The chair of Yisrael Beiteinu, the party headed by Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, in Upper Nazareth has called for a campaign to pay Palestinian citizens to leave the city.
As reported by HaKol HaYehudi (‘The Jewish Voice’) – and translated here – Alex Gedalkin has suggested that $10,000 be paid to every family that would sell its house “and leave town forever”.
Justifying his proposal, the Yisrael Beiteinu activist explained that such a move would “benefit everyone” by “avoid[ing] needless friction in the city and maintain[ing] the Jewish character of Upper Nazareth”.
The report also notes that the Mayor of Upper Nazareth “praised the initiative but stressed that the municipality cannot provide assistance for legal reasons.” Mayor Gapso has previously explained that he is “all for a democratic Upper Nazareth, but first of all a Jewish one.” In 2010, a message from the mayor on the city’s website stated: “Just as [David] Ben-Gurion and [Shimon] Peres said in the 1950s that the Galilee must be Jewish, we say the same about Nazareth Illit [Upper Nazereth]…The primary goal is to put the brakes on the demographic deterioration.”
Built to Judaize Nazareth
By way of providing further context, the following is an extract from my book ‘Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy’:
Having confiscated land ‘in the public interest’ in the mid 1950s, the Israeli government created Upper Nazareth, overlooking Nazareth, the largest Palestinian city inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders. In 1953, a government official acknowledged that ‘making Nazareth a partially Jewish city’ would be ‘a colonizing act with difficulties’, but its importance was also clear. The director of the IDF Planning Department said that the role of Upper Nazareth would be to ‘emphasize and safeguard the Jewish character of the Galilee as a whole’, while according to the Northern Military Governor, the final aim of the settlement was to ‘swallow up’ the Arab city through ‘growth of the Jewish population around a hard-core group’.
In a 1957 letter reproduced in a publication marking the Jewish town’s thirtieth anniversary, the then Prime Minister, Ben Gurion, wrote that ‘the new settlement must be a Jewish town that will assert a Jewish presence in the area’. In the mid 1960s, an Israeli newspaper article described the creation of Upper Nazareth as a governmental decision ‘to impose on Arab Nazareth a Jewish town … whose purpose – whose basic, primary, and even sole purpose is ‘to break’ Arab autonomy in the region and in this city, and later, to create a Jewish majority’.
Today, while Upper Nazareth’s 50,000 inhabitants occupy 42,000 dunams, down the hill in Nazareth, 70,000 Palestinians are forced into just 14,000 dunams: four times as crowded. Yet ironically, it is precisely this lack of room for expansion that has forced those Palestinians who can afford it to move to Upper Nazareth. This is the context for more recent efforts intended to consolidate the city’s ‘Jewishness’, like the announcement in June 2009 of a new ultra-Orthodox neighbourhood ‘to counter Arabs moving in’. A month later, Rabbi Dov Lior, chair of the Yesha Rabbis Council, called for ‘the public to act to “Judaize”’ Upper Nazareth.
Nurit Peled-Elhanan
9 June 2012
I dedicate my words this evening to three hunger-strikers. Mahmoud Sarsak, who has been striking for 83 days. An excellent football player from Gaza, he was arrested three years ago under the Law against Illegal Combatants, which permits him to be imprisoned for life, without a trial and without charge. Akram Rikhawi, who has been imprisoned since 2004 and has been on a hunger-strike since 12 April, in protest against his not being released despite the fragile state of his health. And Samer al-Barq, who renewed his hunger-strike after he had stopped it, with the signing of the agreement, because like many who were released, he got a new administrative detention order. Those prisoners are still alive because “when freedom takes hold of a person’s soul, even the gods cannot touch him.” (Jean-Paul Sartre) Not the god of Zionist power and not the Israeli angel of death. Those prisoners, and thousands more like them, including more than twenty Members of Parliament including the Chairman of the Parliament, Dr. Aziz Dweik, are being held without justice or trial, under humiliating conditions, for years, without visits or hope. They are the freedom fighters of this country who remind us again and again that we all live under occupation and that only their liberation will restore our freedom to us.
Arab citizens of Israel have been living under occupation for nearly sixty-five years now, and the Jewish citizens of Israel are living under a siege that they have imposed on themselves. We are all subjects of a colonialist regime that includes the appropriation of lands and water resources, ethnic cleansing, destruction of the landscape and destruction of the human spirit. A language and culture of which they have no need except to express their being conquered has been imposed on the Arabs whose language and culture has been deliberately and institutionally removed from the lives of the Jews, so that we cannot teach our children and remind their children that “there can also be a love story between an Arab poet and this country.” (Mahmoud Darwish). Thus since its establishment Israel has been perpetuating, in the manner of oppressive regimes, an alienated society and a culture cut off from this place, its residents, its aromas and its tastes. Even the trees and the flowers in our gardens are alienated, foreign, and do not belong. This alienation testifies again and again that on the day of its founding Israel emblazoned on its flag the symbol of apartheid and racism, and eschewed the symbol of freedom and brotherhood that ensures democracy.
This year the apartheid regime of the State of the Jews proved its complete loyalty to racism and the principles of racism. Twenty-five racist bills were submitted and more than ten racist laws have been passed this year, and hardly any Jewish citizens went out onto the streets. More than three hundred people imprisoned without trial launched a hunger strike to the death for two months and more, and hardly any Jewish citizens went onto the streets. Thousands of children are not going to school in East Jerusalem because the Jewish ministry of education does not allocate classes or because the racist Citizenship Law makes them the citizens on no-place and no one is going onto the streets. The separation of families, the expulsion of residents, the confiscation of lands, children abducted from their beds and cruelly interrogated, families evicted from their homes out onto the street, farmers tortured by kippa-wearing bullies under the protection of the army and on the orders of the government – and hardly anyone goes out onto the streets. That is the peak achievement of the Zionist movement.
The State of Israel, which was officially declared as an apartheid state, is distinguished by what has always been the most typical and successful method of racism: the classification of human beings. The Hebrew language that keeps getting uglier under the auspices of the army of Occupation and the bureaucracy of Occupation, is full of classifications: there are people who are a cancer in the heart of the nation and there are people who are a security danger, and there are people who are a plague or a demographic nightmare and there are people who are a health risk, all of them classified and categorized in such a way that even the most ignorant and boorish of Israel’s ministers manage to learn this categorization by heart.
We are all subject to classifications. We are all controlled by the racist laws of this place, and voluntarily placed into ghettos. The Zionist ghetto has learned not to see and not to hear anything beyond the walls that surround it: the real walls made of concrete, and the imaginary walls made of obedience, hate and terrible fear. We do not dare protest against the racist laws, we do not dare to defy racist signs, we do not dare to defend tortured children, we do not dare to break the walls of Gaza, and we do not dare go to Hebron and Deheisheh, to Jenin and Ramallah to ask after the neighbours. That is the great victory of the Occupation. Under the cover of the Occupation, we choose again and again to fold under the rule of criminals of every kind, war criminals, ignoramuses and boors. Thus do we punish ourselves for our helplessness and the withering of our spirit. Year after year we take our children to the gates of the schools, let them learn in an education system that burns books of history and citizenship and authorizes books that incite the murder of children. We abandon them to brainwashing and lies about the War of Liberation we won and Jerusalem Day that signifies our conquests, and the parade for Samaria, which is ours, we let them be taken to Hebron, the City of our Patriarchs, and to the City of David – who is not alive and not well. The teachers in that system do not flinch when they are called upon to poison their pupils’ minds with mendacious stories about our historical rights to the neighbours’ lands, about heroism and victory when it was really ethnic cleansing, inspired and planned by the institutions of racism. The entire purpose of Israeli education is to prepare children to be obedient soldiers of the Israel Occupation Force.
We bow our heads when the most institutionalized terrorist organization in the world takes our children from us and enlists them into its ranks and teaches them how to classify people, how to classify children, how to classify babies, how to classify pain and how to classify the dead. All that, in order to harden their hearts and to dull their senses so that they can abuse, destroy and kill with a clean conscience. We are occupied to such a degree that even when the human being turns into blood we continue to classify without understanding that all of us, the dead and the living, are victims of the corrupting Occupation.
We feel the pain of the parents of one captive Jewish soldier and do not let the pain of the parents of thousands of abducted Palestinian children penetrate through to us, parents who are not allowed to visit their incarcerated children for years because the price demanded of them for the visit is collaboration with the oppressor. We ignore the sufferings of the children of Gaza who are living on the margins of death, victims of malnutrition and lack of medical care, without electricity, without the right to education and livelihood, without a chance and without hope.
As everyone knows today, the 1967 war was not a war of no choice. It was a bolting from the corral by young generals, hot-blooded colts who had sprouted and grown up in the Zionist ghetto and learned to dream of conquest. They trained and trained until they could do so no longer and then took advantage of a moment of stupidity on the part of the neighbours to breach every obstacle, to cast off all restraints and to conquer and expand and destroy joyfully, with intoxicated senses, with a feeling of omnipotent supremacy but without any plan for the future, without any thought for the day after and the millions of human beings who became subjects overnight. In order to justify the devastation and the destruction, the official mythologists were mobilized to affix a scriptural verse to every profane killing and an entire nation was swept into the stream of plunder and exploitation, surpassing themselves every year, because the Jewish genius, from the moment it was enlisted for the task of ruin and devastation, destruction and killing, has not stopped taking out ever more patents.
Today, when the Occupation is beginning to show its effect on the quality of life of the ruling nation, they are rising up and demanding social justice. But social justice too is classified. Social justice is for residents of this ghetto, not of that ghetto. Residents of that ghetto will only spoil our social justice if we include them in our demands, if we give them a forum, if we let their voices be heard in demand of what is theirs. Because that ghetto is there for security reasons and its residents are not victims of injustice and racism but are a security problem, each and every one of them. And when they are killed it is not from racism but from political considerations and we don’t get involved in politics. Therefore that movement for social justice, the failure of which was written on the wall upon its inception, is the most spectacular product of the Israeli education system.
Woe to us that the criminals of the Occupation today are our children, woe to us that we have so succumbed to racism, that we have thus permitted the apartheid criminals to occupy our spirits and to cut us off from everything that is human, from everything that is just, from everything that is peace and quiet, good neighbourliness, love of humanity, mercifulness and compassion, in order to achieve their base objectives. The spirits of the hunger-striking prisoners in their cramped cells are breathing freedom and liberty, and our spirit is oppressed and expiring.
We are living in a ghetto that has no city and no homeland, the language of which is not the local language, a ghetto that has no place to open onto except the bypass roads that pass by everything that is alive.
The time has come when we must join our neighbours all over the Middle East, to sing the praises of the true rebellion, to declare the opening of the borders and the breaking of the barriers, to break down the doors of the prisons, to return the olives and the vineyards to their owners, to return the Children of Palestine to their borders and their land and to try to recover what was lost and trampled under the hobnailed boots of the fat bullies. Only then, if the true children of this country will permit us to learn how to live in it, we too may be able to liberate ourselves from the Occupation and be free from fear, because as Menachem Begin said: “The essence of freedom is freedom from fear, because fear is no less terrible a ruler for its being concealed.”
Among us the fear is overt; among us fear is the motivating force behind every action. Fear of refusal to serve in the Occupation army, fear of supporting a justified boycott of the produce of the settlements, fear of visiting the neighbours. Kindergarten children who arrived here from Ethiopia a few months ago already know whom to hate and whom to fear. They are struck with terror and fear of “the Arabs” they have never seen in person. They are sure that it was the Arabs who burned the Temple, who murdered Jews in Germany, who detained them in Gondar, who are lying in wait for them on all sides. We must liberate our children from the walls of fear and teach them the bases of liberty and responsibility, and explain to them and to ourselves that a person who obeys restrictions that prevent him from going wherever he wants, even if it is Hebron or Jenin or Ramallah – is not a free person but a conquered person. A person who invents laws that restrict the ability of their neighbours to get an education and make a living is a repressed person, a person under siege. That siege can be lifted only by resistance of the type that we see in Bil’in and Ni’lin, Babi Salah, Maasara and through courageous civil disobedience, with a blanket “no” – as our neighbours are doing.
I will conclude with a few lines written by Almog Behar, who wrote the following to Mahmoud Darwish:
To my brother Mahmoud Darwish: who made our history conflicted
And placed me among the high towers
Standing watch over the heavy gates of Gaza
Observing the windows of houses through the sights of rifles?
Who erected between us walls of concrete and iron and the eyes of cameras
And divided us into conquerors and conquered
When we should be brothers?
<i>Translated from Hebrew by George Malent</i>
Source : facebook Nurit’s page
The General’s Son:
Journey of an Israeli in Palestine
with
Miko Peled
Israeli Peace Activist
Thursday, 21 June 2012
12:30 – 2:00 p.m.
The Palestine Center
In 1997, tragedy struck the family of Israeli-American Miko Peled. His beloved niece was killed by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem. That tragedy propelled Peled onto a journey of discovery. It pushed him to re-examine many of the beliefs he had grown up with as the son and grandson of leading figures in Israel’s political-military elite, and transformed him into a courageous and visionary peace activist. The General’s Son is his account of that journey.
Miko Peled is a writer and Israeli peace activist living in San Diego. His father was the late General Matti Peled, his grandfather Avraham Katsnelson signed the Israeli declaration of independence, and his niece Smadar was killed in a suicide attack in Jerusalem. He is the co founder of the Elbanna- Peled Foundtion in memory of Smadar Elhanan and Abir Aramin. He is a regular contributor to online publications including The Electronic Intifada, The Palestine Chronicle, and his website mikopeled.com.
Copies of the book will be available for purchase.
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by Annie Robbins on May 29, 2012 14
Nidal Izziden Fattash
This is a story of an amazing bittersweet twist of fate, of a mother’s love for her son and how she stepped in to save his dreams in a system designed to crush Palestinians.
On May 23, Israeli forces stormed the dormitory of An-Najah University in Nablus. They arrested Nidal Izziden Fattash, a graduate student, hours before he was due to present his master’s thesis to the university committee. He had just completed his project at 2 am.
Nidal’s mother, a school principal, had helped her son throughout his MA degree, and knew the subject of his research well.
“It had been three weeks since I’d seen Nidal, he had been engaged and busy working on his final project which forced him to stay at the university in Nablus. I kept in touch with him through Facebook and phone calls,” she said.
After finding out about his arrest, Nidal’s mother headed to work with thoughts racing through her head.
After consulting with the university administration and several teachers, she decided to represent her son by presenting his final MA project to the university committee.
With a confident voice and sheer determination, Nidal’s mother discussed her son’s final project and answered all of the committee’s questions on the subject.
She was later told by the university that Nidal had passed his presentation and successfully obtained his MA degree.
“I did this for Nidal in revenge against the Israeli occupation, who tried to crush my son’s happiness, and to deliver a message to the whole world that there is a strong Palestinian will which can’t be conquered,” she said.
Nidal Izziden Fattash is still being detained by Israel’s military occupation authorities. The charges against him are unknown.
I would like to congratulate Nidal on his master’s degree.
Let’s hope Israel releases him shortly. Arresting someone hours before finalizing a dream that takes years of study and effort to achieve seems particularly cruel and heartless. But it is what we’ve come to expect from this military occupation.
|
Washington, DC – Lydda, a city home to some 20,000 Palestinians in 1948 quickly swelled to a population of 50,000 as refugees flocked from the cleansed city of Jaffa. After four days of siege, Israeli forces carried out expulsion orders during Operation Dani, leaving fewer than 1,000 residents remaining.
Yitzhak Rabin, an Israeli Brigadier General at the time, described how they perpetrated the ethnic cleansing of Lydda and neighbouring Ramle in July of 1948. To this day, however, the Israeli state prevents this description from being printed in Rabin’s memoirs.
I often wonder what must have been going through my grandfather’s head when he, and others among the few who managed to remain, realised the busy municipality that they had once called home had been reduced to a ghost town.
Perhaps they were in shock, an understandable reaction, given the circumstances. Perhaps they were busy attempting to care for the injured, of which there were plenty. Or maybe they were trying to secure their possessions from Israeli looters who ravaged the vacant homes and stores of businessmen-turned-refugees overnight. Israeli historians, such as Tom Segev, note that 1,800 trucks of possessions were looted from Lydda alone.
Once the dust cleared and the shock subsided, reality must have begun to set in. In a few months’ time, the Palestinian Arabs had gone from being a majority living in their ancestral homeland, albeit amid tension, to being a minority living under a state that had just made refugees out of most of their kin and would refuse them re-entry.
Legalising theft
For Palestinian citizens of Israel, like Palestinians elsewhere, the Nakba was just beginning. The looting which took place was also a preliminary glimpse into the theft of land, property and identity that would ensue in the coming years.
Ironically, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, who Rabin said ordered the expulsion of Palestinians during Operation Dani, expressed shock that Israelis were simply stealing the possessions of Palestinians in Lydda and elsewhere. How he reconciled a moral defence of ethnic cleansing with moral outrage at looting is beyond my comprehension.
| “Yaacov Shapire, an Israeli attorney in 1946, did not mince words when criticising these laws used by the British against the Zionists at the time and likened them to Nazi Germnay. Two years later, Shapira… would adopt these very laws to rule over the Arab minority.“ |
Nonetheless, with the establishment of the state of Israel on the ruins of Palestine, theft had to be disguised by legalisms. Prior to the war, Jewish ownership of land in Palestine was minimal. Now, after the depopulation, the vast majority of land controlled by the Jewish state was not owned by Jews and many of the owners now resided in refugee camps.
To solve this predicament, the Israeli legislature enacted various laws which allowed the state to assume control of 92 per cent of the land. The first step was using a century old Ottoman law (two-empires old at this point) to declare the land “absentee land”. This meant that the owners of the land were not present (because they were refugees not permitted to return) and that the state could assume control of it.
But refugees weren’t the only ones dispossessed by this measure. Palestinians who managed to remain inside the boundaries of the new Israeli state but were prevented from living on their land became internally displaced persons (IDPs). These IDPs falling victim to Israel’s legalised land theft are known as “present absentees”.
Martial law
With their society decimated, their family members and kin spread across the region in refugee camps from Lebanon to Jordan to Gaza, their properties looted and land confiscated, Palestinian citizens of Israel had to deal with another reality in the wake of the Nakba: living under martial law.
Israeli martial law, which governed Palestinian Arabs from the establishment of the state to 1966, was based on British Mandate-era emergency regulations. In the 1930s, the British used these regulations as the framework for the repression of the Palestinian Arab uprisings. Then in the 1940s, the British used them to crack down against Zionist dissidents. For this reason, such regulations were decried by Zionists prior to the establishment of the state. Yaacov Shapira, an Israeli attorney in 1946, did not mince words when criticising these laws used by the British against the Zionists at the time and likened them to Nazi Germany. Two years later, Shapira would be serving as the attorney general for the first Israeli government and would adopt these very laws to rule over the Arab minority.
Martial law was similar in many ways to the occupation we know today. During this period, the military government was empowered to deport people from their towns or villages, summon any person to a police station at any time or put under house arrest, use administrative detention or incarceration without charge, confiscate property, impose total or partial curfew, forbid or restrict movement and so on.
This, keep in mind, was not happening in Hebron or Nablus or Ramallah, this was taking place in what many today romanticise as the golden age of “democratic” Israel – inside the green line.
| “I enjoy it, especially when travelling between Haifa and Tel Aviv, and there is not a single Arab to be seen.“– Israeli member of the MAPAI secretariat |
Discriminatory laws
After the depopulation, an Israeli member of the MAPAI secretariat remarked in 1949: “The landscape is also more beautiful. I enjoy it, especially when travelling between Haifa and Tel Aviv, and there is not a single Arab to be seen.”
It is this kind of drive for ethnic homogeneity, present since the founding of the Israeli state, that underpins many of the laws that discriminate against Israel’s Palestinian Arab citizens. A Jew from anywhere in the world, for example, can move to Israel – while a Palestinian Arab refugee, born within the present-day borders of Israel is not permitted to return. Likewise, laws also prevent Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel who have non-citizen Palestinian spouses from residing in Israel as a family. This is to prevent what the Israeli prime minister termed “demographic spillover”. This restricts the population of Palestinian citizens of Israel from marrying from most of their kin because doing so would mean either having to live separately or living outside of Israel.
Budgetary spending is also discriminatory. Despite making up over 20 per cent of the population, Palestinian citizens of Israel have watched the state build hundreds of new towns for Israeli Jews, while a handful were built for the Palestinians. Even these towns, such as Rahat, were built in part to concentrate Palestinian Bedouin from unrecognised villages. Many Palestinian Bedouin villages remain unrecognised by the Israeli state, are not provided with civil resources and are left off the electric grid. Al-Arakib, a village in the Negev, has, as of this writing, been demolished by Israeli officials, and rebuilt by its residents, some 38 times.
Lingering in the psyche
Indeed, the Nakba is the central and uniting experience of Palestinians everywhere. It comes as no surprise then that Palestinian citizens of Israel alive today, who did not experience the Nakba first hand,still have political views shaped by the events of 1948.
Polls of Palestinian citizens of Israel, performed as recently as 2010, uncovered interesting trends in the views of respondents based on whether they have relatives who were refugees. Those who have refugee relatives were almost three times as likely to identify as Palestinian first (instead of Arab, Muslim or Israeli) than those who did not. They are twice as likely to support Iran’s right to a nuclear program, twice as likely to reject Israel’s defining itself as a “Jewish State” and twice as likely to oppose a loyalty oath to the state of Israel.
For Palestinians in Israel, it is clear that the Nakba still lingers as a major factor, determining their views toward the state that governs them.
In sum, the Nakba and its implications has, since the transformative events of 1948, continued to directly impact the Palestinian citizens of the Israeli state. While Palestinians exist across various borders as refugees, residents or citizens of different states, the Nakba continues to be the tie that binds them. This is not only because of a shared memory from the lives of their grandparents, but also because varying, often harsh, present realities rooted in events of the Nakba can only be relegated to distant memory if a peace, based on justice for the Nakba, can be achieved.
Yousef Munayyer is Executive Director of the Palestine Centre in Washington, DC.
Second part no subtitles :
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