The Guardian UK, 10 November 2010
“With the two-state solution close to collapse, it may be that
the Palestinians of Israel are at last about to move centre stage. . . .
The sense of being one people is deepening.”
In a quiet street in the Sheikh Jarrah district of occupied East
Jerusalem 88-year-old Rifka al-Kurd is explaining how she came to live
in the house she and her husband built as Palestinian refugees in the
1950s. As she speaks, three young ultra-orthodox Jewish settlers swagger
in to stake their claim to the front part of the building, shouting
abuse in Hebrew and broken Arabic: “Arab animals”, “shut up, whore”.
There is a brief physical confrontation with Rifka’s daughter as the
settlers barricade themselves in to the rooms they have occupied since
last winter. That was when they finally won a court order to take over
the Kurd family’s extension on the grounds that it was built without
permission — which Palestinians in Jerusalem are almost never granted.
It is an ugly scene, the settlers’ chilling arrogance underpinned by the
certain knowledge that they can call in the police and army at will.
But such takeovers of Palestinian homes in Sheikh Jarrah have become
commonplace, and the focus of continual protest. The same is true in
nearby Silwan, home to upwards of 30,000 Palestinians next to the Old
City, where 88 homes to 1,500 Palestinians have been lined up for
demolition to make way for a King David theme park and hundreds of
settlers are protected round the clock by trigger-happy security guards.
Throughout the Arab areas of Jerusalem, as in the West Bank, the
government is pressing ahead with land expropriations, demolitions and
settlement building, making the prospects of a Palestinian state ever
more improbable. More than a third of the land in East Jerusalem has
been expropriated since it was occupied in 1967 to make way for Israeli
colonists, in flagrant violation of international law.
Israel’s latest settlement plans were not “helpful”, Barack Obama
ventured on Tuesday. But while US-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian
negotiations go nowhere and attention has been focused on the brutal
siege of Gaza, the colonisation goes on. It is also proceeding apace in
Israel proper, where the demolition of Palestinian Bedouin villages
around the Negev desert has accelerated under Binyamin Netanyahu.
About 87,000 Bedouin live in 45 “unrecognised” villages, without
rights or basic public services, because the Israeli authorities refuse
to recognise their claim to the land. All have demolition orders hanging
over them, while hundreds of Jewish settlements have been established
throughout the area.
The Israeli writer Amos Oz calls the Negev a “ticking time bomb”. The
village of Araqeeb has been destroyed six times in recent months and
each time it has been reconstructed by its inhabitants. The government
wants to clear the land and move the Bedouin into designated townships.
But even there, demolitions are carried out on a routine basis.
At the weekend, a mosque in the Bedouin town of Rahat was torn down
by the army in the night. By Sunday afternoon, local people were already
at work on rebuilding it, as patriotic songs blared out from the PA
system and activists addressed an angry crowd.
The awakening of the Negev Bedouin, many of whom used to send their
sons to fight in the Israeli army, reflects a wider politicisation of
the Arab citizens of Israel. Cut off from the majority of Palestinians
after 1948, they tried to find an accommodation with the state whose
discrimination against them was, in the words of former prime minister
Ehud Olmert, “deep-seated and intolerable” from the first.
That effort has as good as been abandoned. The Arab parties in the
Israeli Knesset now reject any idea of Israel as an ethnically defined
state, demanding instead a “state of all its people”. The influential
Islamic Movement refuses to take part in the Israeli political system at
all. The Palestinians of ’48, who now make up getting on for 20% of the
population, are increasingly organising themselves on an independent
basis — and in common cause with their fellow Palestinians across the
Green Line.
Palestinian experience inside Israel, from land confiscations to
settlement building and privileged ethnic segregation, is not after all
so different from what has taken place in East Jerusalem and the West
Bank. After 1948, the Palestinians of Jaffa who survived ethnic
cleansing were forced to share their houses with Jewish settlers — just
as Rifka al-Kurd is in Jerusalem today. The sense of being one people is
deepening.
That has been intensified by ever more aggressive attempts under the
Netanyahu government to bring Israel’s Arab citizens to heel, along with
growing demands to transfer hundreds of thousands of them to a future
West Bank administration. A string of new laws targeting the Palestinian
minority are in the pipeline, including the bill agreed by the Israeli
cabinet last month requiring all new non-Jewish citizens to swear an
oath of allegiance to Israel as a Jewish state.
Pressure on Palestinian leaders and communities is becoming harsher. A
fortnight ago more than a thousand soldiers and police were on hand to
protect a violent march by a far-right racist Israeli group through the
Palestinian town of Umm al-Fahm. The leader of the Islamic Movement,
Ra’ed Salah, is in prison for spitting at a policeman; the Palestinian
MP Haneen Zoabi has been stripped of her parliamentary privileges for
joining the Gaza flotilla; and leading civil rights campaigner Ameer
Makhoul faces up to 10 years in jail after being convicted of the
improbable charge of spying for Hezbollah.
Meanwhile Israel is also demanding that the Palestinian leadership in
Ramallah recognise Israel as a Jewish state as part of any agreement.
Few outside the Palestinian Authority — or even inside it — seem to
believe that the “peace process” will lead to any kind of settlement.
Even Fatah leaders such as Nabil Sha’ath now argue that the Palestinians
need to consider a return to armed resistance, or a shift to the South
African model of mass popular resistance, also favoured by prominent
Palestinians in Israel.
As for the people who actually won the last elections, Mahmoud
Ramahi, the Hamas secretary general of the Palestinian parliament,
reminded me on Monday that the US continues to veto any reconciliation
with Fatah. He was arrested by the Israelis barely 24 hours later, just
as talks between the two parties were getting going in Damascus.
The focus of the Palestinian-Israeli struggle has shifted over the
last 40 years from Jordan to Lebanon to the occupied territories. With
the two-state solution close to collapse, it may be that the
Palestinians of Israel are at last about to move centre stage. If so,
the conflict that more than any other has taken on a global dimension
will have finally come full circle.
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