SUR BAHER, Occupied East Jerusalem – “We knew something bad was about to happen when we saw the roadblocks being thrown up, and police everywhere. It soon came down the grapevine – the Israelis were demolishing more houses.”

Naim Awisat, an East Jerusalem Palestinian community leader and entrepreneur, drove quickly down America Way (the winding old valley road that links the city’ southern neighbourhoods of the Holy Basin with the walled Old City and its holy sites) to Sala’a, a rundown quarter at the heart of the wadi.

The tok-tok-tok of the heavy machinery could be heard “even before I’d rounded the last corner into the dusty square. A ring of troops in full anti- riot gear were in position. I have to admit it was something of a relief when I saw that what they were destroying was only that old derelict building with a corrugated iron roof where our kids used to gather to play pool, and who knows what else – drugs, what have you.”

His friend Mohammed Nakhal, an urban planner, was already there. Before they could exchange thoughts about the latest Israeli action, Mohammed’s cell phone was ringing non-stop – a string of calls from Dahiyat a-Salaam in the northern part of the city, and from Sur Baher just over the hill on the way to Bethlehem.

More demolitions were under way.

No more sighs of relief, though.

“Heart wrenching – that’s what it is when you see 15 people, seven of them children, left homeless out of the blue,” says Naim when he reaches Sur Baher.

He watches from a distance: the three giant Israeli bulldozers, replete with cranes, hammer away relentlessly at what a half-hour ago had been the Nimr family home.

Barely holding back her tears, the matriarch, Umm Muhammed, brushes off the grey dust that has gathered on her brown headscarf. Her husband, Nimr Ali Nimr, sits incongruously in a large armchair, one of the few sticks of furniture which the family had managed to salvage during the few minutes they’d been given to evacuate before the bulldozers were sent into action.

He tells Naim and Mohammed that here too the demolition squad had been escorted in by a phalanx of heavily-equipped border police.

Still in something of a daze, Nimr says that when the machines began tearing into the concrete two-storey building, there’d been a brief protest by the teenagers of the neighbourhood. “They threw stones; fortunately, the troops held their fire.”

Two hours later, the troops are gone. All that remains of what had once been the extended family home is a pile of rubble – useless concrete and twisted iron girders. Overriding previous U.S. and international protest, Jerusalem’s Israeli municipality had nonetheless gone ahead with a spate of new house demolitions in the occupied eastern part of the city.

Altogether on Tuesday, six buildings were knocked down, leaving 26 people homeless.

The latest round brings the number of East Jerusalem Palestinians displaced since the beginning of the year by forced evictions or house demolitions to over 600, according to figures released by UNWRA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees.

Israeli authorities say the demolitions are carried out because the Palestinians owners do not have the requisite building permits, rendering them “illegal”.

According to the UN, lack of adequate urban planning in the Palestinian areas of Jerusalem, combined with strict administrative requirements and high fees makes it extremely difficult for Palestinian residents to obtain such permits, leaving them no choice but to build “illegally” for their growing families.

“We should hoist them on the petard of their own building policy,” says Naim. “If they say we can’t build without permits, we say, fine, but then you have to give us permits to develop new residential areas in our neighborhoods. The overcrowding has been unbearable for years.”

In addition to the building squeeze, Palestinian families who move outside the city’s municipal boundaries risk losing their Jerusalem identity cards, and with that, the right to live in the city, and keep their access to it.

UNWRA officials estimate that “as many as 60,000 of the city’s quarter million Palestinians are at risk from forced eviction, demolitions and displacement.” Many others face mounting pressure to leave the city due to extensive legal and administrative restrictions that affect many aspects of their daily lives.

“If it goes on like this, over and above the current tension over Israeli intentions to erode our links to our own holy sites, they’re simply laying the cornerstone for a new Intifadah (uprising),” warns Mohammad.

Still, he refuses to see the future as entirely bleak.

The U.S. Secretary of State is due in the city on Saturday in an attempt to revive flagging Palestinian-Israeli peace prospects. When Hillary Clinton visited the city in March, she delivered a strongly-worded rebuke against the house demolition policy, triggering a set-to with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Israeli leader insists that outsiders have “no right” to tell Israel what it can and cannot do “in our capital city.”

Because of Israel’s determination to go on knocking down Palestinian homes, a shadow again looms over renewed U.S. peacemaking efforts.

Says Mohammed: “What we really need to do is to beat the Israelis on their own ground, work from within to make sure we get what is rightly ours.

“There are also thousands of existing demolition orders against illegal construction in the western (Jewish) part of town. We need to work from inside the municipality if we want to change the situation and to stop the demolitions altogether.

“Sure, we have to protest. But protest is not enough; neither is hand-wringing and just bemoaning our fate. It’s just as important for Washington to press Israel to issue us more building permits. That should be part of the ‘America way’.”

SUR BAHER, Occupied East Jerusalem – “We knew something bad was about to happen when we saw the roadblocks being thrown up, and police everywhere. It soon came down the grapevine – the Israelis were demolishing more houses.”

Naim Awisat, an East Jerusalem Palestinian community leader and entrepreneur, drove quickly down America Way (the winding old valley road that links the city’ southern neighbourhoods of the Holy Basin with the walled Old City and its holy sites) to Sala’a, a rundown quarter at the heart of the wadi.

The tok-tok-tok of the heavy machinery could be heard “even before I’d rounded the last corner into the dusty square. A ring of troops in full anti- riot gear were in position. I have to admit it was something of a relief when I saw that what they were destroying was only that old derelict building with a corrugated iron roof where our kids used to gather to play pool, and who knows what else – drugs, what have you.”

His friend Mohammed Nakhal, an urban planner, was already there. Before they could exchange thoughts about the latest Israeli action, Mohammed’s cell phone was ringing non-stop – a string of calls from Dahiyat a-Salaam in the northern part of the city, and from Sur Baher just over the hill on the way to Bethlehem.

More demolitions were under way.

No more sighs of relief, though.

“Heart wrenching – that’s what it is when you see 15 people, seven of them children, left homeless out of the blue,” says Naim when he reaches Sur Baher.

He watches from a distance: the three giant Israeli bulldozers, replete with cranes, hammer away relentlessly at what a half-hour ago had been the Nimr family home.

Barely holding back her tears, the matriarch, Umm Muhammed, brushes off the grey dust that has gathered on her brown headscarf. Her husband, Nimr Ali Nimr, sits incongruously in a large armchair, one of the few sticks of furniture which the family had managed to salvage during the few minutes they’d been given to evacuate before the bulldozers were sent into action.

He tells Naim and Mohammed that here too the demolition squad had been escorted in by a phalanx of heavily-equipped border police.

Still in something of a daze, Nimr says that when the machines began tearing into the concrete two-storey building, there’d been a brief protest by the teenagers of the neighbourhood. “They threw stones; fortunately, the troops held their fire.”

Two hours later, the troops are gone. All that remains of what had once been the extended family home is a pile of rubble – useless concrete and twisted iron girders. Overriding previous U.S. and international protest, Jerusalem’s Israeli municipality had nonetheless gone ahead with a spate of new house demolitions in the occupied eastern part of the city.

Altogether on Tuesday, six buildings were knocked down, leaving 26 people homeless.

The latest round brings the number of East Jerusalem Palestinians displaced since the beginning of the year by forced evictions or house demolitions to over 600, according to figures released by UNWRA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees.

Israeli authorities say the demolitions are carried out because the Palestinians owners do not have the requisite building permits, rendering them “illegal”.

According to the UN, lack of adequate urban planning in the Palestinian areas of Jerusalem, combined with strict administrative requirements and high fees makes it extremely difficult for Palestinian residents to obtain such permits, leaving them no choice but to build “illegally” for their growing families.

“We should hoist them on the petard of their own building policy,” says Naim. “If they say we can’t build without permits, we say, fine, but then you have to give us permits to develop new residential areas in our neighborhoods. The overcrowding has been unbearable for years.”

In addition to the building squeeze, Palestinian families who move outside the city’s municipal boundaries risk losing their Jerusalem identity cards, and with that, the right to live in the city, and keep their access to it.

UNWRA officials estimate that “as many as 60,000 of the city’s quarter million Palestinians are at risk from forced eviction, demolitions and displacement.” Many others face mounting pressure to leave the city due to extensive legal and administrative restrictions that affect many aspects of their daily lives.

“If it goes on like this, over and above the current tension over Israeli intentions to erode our links to our own holy sites, they’re simply laying the cornerstone for a new Intifadah (uprising),” warns Mohammad.

Still, he refuses to see the future as entirely bleak.

The U.S. Secretary of State is due in the city on Saturday in an attempt to revive flagging Palestinian-Israeli peace prospects. When Hillary Clinton visited the city in March, she delivered a strongly-worded rebuke against the house demolition policy, triggering a set-to with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Israeli leader insists that outsiders have “no right” to tell Israel what it can and cannot do “in our capital city.”

Because of Israel’s determination to go on knocking down Palestinian homes, a shadow again looms over renewed U.S. peacemaking efforts.

Says Mohammed: “What we really need to do is to beat the Israelis on their own ground, work from within to make sure we get what is rightly ours.

“There are also thousands of existing demolition orders against illegal construction in the western (Jewish) part of town. We need to work from inside the municipality if we want to change the situation and to stop the demolitions altogether.

“Sure, we have to protest. But protest is not enough; neither is hand-wringing and just bemoaning our fate. It’s just as important for Washington to press Israel to issue us more building permits. That should be part of the ‘America way’.”

UNRWA official: Israeli refusal to allow stationary into Gaza illogical

[ 23/10/2009 - 01:21 PM ]

Gaza school children doing their homework in the open after loss of their homes

GAZA, (PIC)– An UNRWA official in Gaza criticised the Israeli occupation for not allowing stationary and textbooks into the Gaza Strip describing this action as illogical and unacceptable.

Adnan Abu Hasna, spokesman for the UNRWA is Gaza said on Thursday that hundreds of thousands of Palestinian school-children are affected by this Israeli ban on stationary and textbooks to schools.

He said that even when stationary is found in some shops, it is too expensive for parents, who are unemployed and are suffering because of the bad economic situation, to buy for their children.

Abu Hasna expressed astonishment at the Israeli insistence to ban the entry of these materials asking: “What is the link between stationary and textbooks and the security of Israel?!”

UNRWA official: Israeli refusal to allow stationary into Gaza illogical

[ 23/10/2009 - 01:21 PM ]

Gaza school children doing their homework in the open after loss of their homes

GAZA, (PIC)– An UNRWA official in Gaza criticised the Israeli occupation for not allowing stationary and textbooks into the Gaza Strip describing this action as illogical and unacceptable.

Adnan Abu Hasna, spokesman for the UNRWA is Gaza said on Thursday that hundreds of thousands of Palestinian school-children are affected by this Israeli ban on stationary and textbooks to schools.

He said that even when stationary is found in some shops, it is too expensive for parents, who are unemployed and are suffering because of the bad economic situation, to buy for their children.

Abu Hasna expressed astonishment at the Israeli insistence to ban the entry of these materials asking: “What is the link between stationary and textbooks and the security of Israel?!”

You might think Palestinian refugees would be welcomed by their Arab neighbours, yet they are denied basic rights and citizenship

A special report by Judith Miller and David Samuels

Thursday, 22 October 2009

It is a cynical but time-honoured practice in Middle Eastern politics: the statesmen who decry the political and humanitarian crisis of the approximately 3.9 million Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in Gaza ignore the plight of an estimated 4.6 million Palestinians who live in Arab countries. For decades, Arab governments have justified their decision to maintain millions of stateless Palestinians as refugees in squalid camps as a means of applying pressure to Israel. The refugee problem will be solved, they say, when Israel agrees to let the Palestinians have their own state.

Yet in the two decades since the end of the Cold War, after two Gulf wars, and the rise and fall of the Oslo peace process, not a single Palestinian refugee has returned to Israel – and only a handful of ageing political functionaries have returned from neighbouring Arab countries to the West Bank and Gaza. Instead, failed peace plans and shifting political priorities have resulted in a second Palestinian “Nakba”, or catastrophe – this one at hands of the Arab governments. “Marginalised, deprived of basic political and economic rights, trapped in the camps, bereft of realistic prospects, heavily armed and standing atop multiple fault lines,” a report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) in Lebanon recently observed, “the refugee population constitutes a time bomb.”

The fact that the divided Palestinian political leadership is silent about the mistreatment of the refugees by Arab states does not make such behaviour any less reprehensible – or less dangerous. Some 250,000 Palestinians were chased out of Kuwait and other Gulf States to punish the Palestinian political leadership for supporting Saddam Hussein. Tens of thousands of Palestinian residents of Iraq were similarly dispossessed after the second Gulf war.

In 2001, Palestinians in Lebanon were stripped of the right to own property, or to pass on the property that they already owned to their children – and banned from working as doctors, lawyers, pharmacists or in 20 other professions. Even the Palestinian refugee community in Jordan, historically the most welcoming Arab state, has reason to feel insecure in the face of official threats to revoke their citizenship. The systematic refusal of Arab governments to grant basic human rights to Palestinians who are born and die in their countries – combined with periodic mass expulsions of entire Palestinian communities – recalls the treatment of Jews in medieval Europe. Along with dispossession and marginalisation has come a new and frightening turn away from the traditional forms of nationalism that once dominated the refugee camps towards the radical pan-Islamic ideology of al-Qa’ida.

Daniel C Kurtzer, who has served as US ambassador to both Israel and Egypt and now advises the Obama administration, says that all American governments have resisted dealing with what he calls the most sensitive issue in the conflict – the normalisation of the status of the Palestinians – through a right of return to Palestine, or citizenship in other countries. “The refugees hold the key to this conflict’s settlement,” he says, “and nobody knows what to do with them.”

In the unlikely event that President Obama’s vision of a swift and final settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict materialises, millions of Palestinians would still live in decaying refugee camps whose inhabitants are forbidden from owning land or participating in normal economic life. The only governing authority that Palestinians living in the camps have ever known is UNRWA – the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. Established by the UN on 8 December 1949 to assist 650,000 impoverished Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war, UNRWA has been battling budget cuts and strikes among its employees as it struggles to provide subsidies and services to Palestinian refugees, who are defined as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948″.

•••

The inclusion of the descendants of Palestinian refugees as refugees in UNRWA’s mandate has no parallel in international humanitarian law and is responsible for the growth of the official numbers of Palestinian refugees in foreign countries from 711,000 to 4.6 million during decades when the number of ageing refugees from the 1948 Israeli war of independence in was in fact declining. UNRWA’s grant of refugee status to the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the original Palestinian refugees according to the principle of patrilineal descent, with no limit on the generations that can obtain refugee status, has made it easy for host countries to flout their obligations under international law. According to Article 34 of the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, “The Contracting States shall as far as possible facilitate the assimilation and naturalisation of refugees,” and must “make every effort to expedite naturalisation proceedings” – the opposite of what happened to the Palestinians in every Arab country in which they settled, save Jordan. For all the easy criticism that can be levelled at UNRWA, it is hard to see how many Palestinian refugees would have survived without the agency’s help.

The responsibility for the legal dimensions of their fate lies elsewhere, as UNRWA Commissioner-General Karen AbuZayd made clear at UNRWA’s anniversary ceremony in New York on 24 September, before an audience that included Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Queen Rania of Jordan – herself a Palestinian. “The protracted exile of Palestine refugees and the dire conditions they endure, particularly in the occupied Palestinian territory, cannot be reconciled with state obligations under the UN Charter,” AbuZayd said. The result for the refugees, AbuZayd said at a forum the previous afternoon at the Princeton Club, is a “suspended state of existence” for which no one seems willing to accept political responsibility. The rest of the discussion, moderated by Ambassador Kurtner, made clear that anticipated solutions to the Palestinian refugee problem had failed to emerge – leaving a community in crisis.

“You can’t ignore an entire people because it’s awkward or inconvenient,” says Dr Karma Nabulsi, a lecturer at Oxford and a former Palestinian representative at the UN. In the period immediately after Oslo, she added, Palestinian refugees in Arab countries hoped to be repatriated to areas governed by the Palestinian Authority. Today, despair has replaced that initial optimism. “What young Palestinian would want to resettle in Gaza or in the West Bank?” she asks.

Sharing a panel with Dr Nabulsi, the doveish former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben Ami, who negotiated directly with Yasser Arafat at the failed Camp David meetings in 2000, asserted that Israel has suppressed narratives that would make clear its responsibility for the Palestinian refugee crisis of 1948. Indifference to the refugees’ plight, he added, was shared by Israel’s negotiating partner in the Oslo years – Yasser Arafat. “He was not a refugee man,” Ben Ami said flatly. “He was much more centred on the question of Jerusalem. I heard him say to [Mahmood Abbas] in my presence, ‘leave me alone with your refugees’.”

It is no secret that certain Arab regimes saw the Palestinians under Arafat’s leadership as an unwelcome occupation that stripped Jordan bare and destroyed Lebanon. Similarly, Arafat often used the threat of destabilisation and assassination to get Arab regimes to fund the Palestinian cause. Still, the record of Arafat’s Palestinian Authority in its territories during the 1990s attests to the truth of Ben Ami’s observation, which applies both to Arafat’s Fatah and to Hamas. Despite $10bn in foreign aid, not one refugee camp in the West Bank or Gaza has been replaced by modern housing. On the West Bank, chances for normal Palestinian communal life have been shattered by Israeli settlements, arrests, checkpoints and roadblocks, and by 15 years of abuses by Fatah. Even under the best of circumstances, an influx of refugees would further destabilise a Palestinian economy that is kept afloat by the world’s highest per capita receipts of foreign aid.

Daniel Kurtzer agrees no one is likely to make a deal that includes a substantial return of the Palestinian diaspora. “Most Palestinian refugees know it, as do the settlers,” he says. So rather than wait for American mediators or Arab states to impose solutions on them, the Palestinians themselves should begin to tackle the diabolically difficult issues inherent in the resolution of their political and economic future. “What we need is a refugee summit,” he says. “I’m looking for a real conversation that must start internally and soon.”

After 60 years of failed wars, and failed peace, it is time to put politics aside and to insist that the basic rights of the Palestinian refugees in Arab countries be respected – whether or not their children’s children return to Haifa anytime soon. While Saudi Arabia may not wish to host Israeli tourists, it can easily afford to integrate the estimated 240,000 Palestinian refugees who already live in the kingdom – just as Egypt, which has received close to $60bn in US aid, and has a population of 81 million, can grant legal rights to an estimated 70,000 Palestinian refugees and their descendants. One can only imagine the outrage that the world community would rightly visit upon Israel if Israeli Arabs were subject to the vile discriminatory laws applied to Palestinians living in Arab countries. Surely, Palestinian Arabs can keep their own national dream alive in the countries where they were born, while also enjoying the freedom to work, vote and own property?

A practical solution to the crisis of the Palestinian refugees in Arab countries will focus on Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, which together play host to approximately 3 million of the estimated 4.6 million Palestinian refugees living outside the West Bank and Gaza. While each of these countries has chosen different legal and political approaches to the 1948 refugees and their descendants, they share a political desire to sublimate the rights of Palestinian residents, treating them as unwanted guests or as tools to be used in pursuing wider political interests – but rarely as fully-fledged members of society. Lebanon, where Palestinians led by Yasser Arafat are widely blamed for having sparked the 1975 civil war, is the worst offender against international norms. Yet even in Jordan, which is in many ways a model for the humane treatment of a large refugee population, Palestinians today feel markedly less secure than they did two decades ago, or even five years ago.

•••

Outside of Iraq, whose Palestinian population fled en masse after the fall of Saddam, nowhere has the situation of the Palestinian refugees worsened so dramatically as in Lebanon. Since the early Sixties, Palestinians there have been barred from working in medicine, dentistry and the law. In 2001, the Lebanese parliament adopted an amendment to the country’s property laws that prohibited the acquisition of real estate by “any person not a citizen of a recognised state” – meaning the estimated 250,000 to 400,000 Palestinians living in Lebanon. Palestinians who had acquired real estate prior to 2001 were barred from bequeathing property to their children.

Right-wing Christians and Shi’ite radicals alike support discriminatory legislation that further impoverishes Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, with the stated goal of preventing them from beginning the process of naturalisation, known as tawtin. In his inaugural speech in May, 2008, Lebanese President Michel Suleiman, a Christian and former head of the country’s armed forces, reaffirmed “Lebanon’s categorical refusal of naturalisation”, a statement echoed by the former Lebanese ambassador to the US, Nassib Lahoud, who told us recently in Beirut: “The confessional balance does not allow these things to happen … at the moment the Palestinians are citizens of a state that does not exist.” His sentiments were echoed by Hizbollah’s spokesman on the Palestinian question, Hassan Hodroj. “The threat of tawtin is genuine,” Hodroj explained. “It is one of the ways in which Israel, backed by the US, is endangering the region.”

The fact that the living standard of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon has been deemed “catastrophic” by both UNRWA and by the Lebanese government can therefore be understood as a deliberate result of official state policy that is supported by all parties across Lebanon’s divided confessional spectrum. As a member of the Lebanese parliament, Ghassan Moukheiber, explained in an interview with the ICG, “our official policy is to maintain Palestinians in a vulnerable, precarious situation to diminish prospects for their naturalisation or permanent settlement”.

Yet the results of this horrifying policy may not be confined to Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. In his book Everyday Jihad, about the experience of refugees in the Ain al-Hilweh camp, home to an estimated 70,000 Palestinians, the French scholar Bernard Rougier describes the results of decades of exclusion and marginalisation which have severed the refugees from any connection to a lost homeland – or the country in which they were born. As a result, he says, many Palestinians have abandoned a failed nationalism for the radical millenarian ideas associated with al-Qa’ida. “Palestinian salafist militants have devoted themselves to defending the imaginary borders of identity,” Rougier writes, “declaring themselves the protectors and guardians of the cause of Sunni Islam worldwide.”

Visitors to the Ain al-Hilweh camp are immediately made aware that they have entered another world. While Lebanese army checkpoints ring the camp, the Lebanese state has no presence inside. Food, water and other basic services are provided by UNRWA, while armed factions openly display weapons in muddy alleyways and recruit generations to serve under their banners. It is easy to see why the secular promise of Palestinian nationalism has faded and why the promise of a Muslim paradise without borders might take its place. One of the 9/11 hijackers dedicated a poem to Ain al-Hilweh’s most prominent jihadist in his videotaped will, and dozens of Palestinian fighters from the camp joined al-Qa’ida in Iraq.

“The situation is the camp is deteriorating,” Rougier told us, when we asked about whether things were getting better or worse for the Palestinians of Lebanon. Bound by their absolute opposition to tawtin, he says, Lebanese leaders are creating a radicalised Palestinian population that will eventually have to be absorbed into Lebanon, despite having little or no allegiance to the state.

Sahar Atrache, lead author of the ICG report on the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, agrees. “Palestinians refugees in Lebanon lack means of socio-economic advancement and are bereft of hope,” he says. “They are vulnerable on all counts – politically, legally and above all physically. The status quo is good neither for the refugees nor for Lebanon itself.”

•••

While Palestinian refugees and their descendants inside Syria are not allowed to vote or hold Syrian passports, they are free from the overt discrimination that has turned Lebanon into a recruiting ground for al-Qa’ida. The legal status of Palestinians inside Syria is defined by a 1956 law that states that grants them “the right to employment, commerce, and national service, while preserving their original nationality”. More than 100,000 of the estimated 450,000 Palestinians in Syria live in or around the Yarmouk refugee camp, which long ago became a neighbourhood of Damascus.

While Palestinians are reasonably well integrated into the Syrian socio-economic structure, according to the scholar Laurie Brand they do not have the right to vote, nor can they stand for parliament or other political offices. Palestinians are barred from buying farmland and prohibited from owning more than one house. The female descendant of a Palestinian refugee can become a Syrian citizen by marrying a Syrian man. The male descendants of Palestinian men and their children are barred from acquiring Syrian citizenship, even if they marry Syrian women.

The major focus of Syrian interest in the Palestinian refugees has long been as an extension of the Assad regime’s policy towards its neighbours – Israel and Lebanon. Damascus has long hosted a variety of Palestinian terror groups that rejected the Oslo process, including Ahmad Jibril’s Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC). More significantly, Damascus is also the political and logistical centre for Hamas. “Syria’s support for armed Palestinian groups is key to pressuring Damascus’ neighbours, most notably Israel and Lebanon,” says Andrew Tabler, author of the Syria-watching blog Eighth Gate.

Syria increases its leverage inside Israel by weakening Fatah and strengthening Hamas. In Lebanon, Syrian military and political interference has turned the refugee camps into “security-free islands” (juzur amniya) where bombers can be recruited, bombs manufactured, and plots can be directed beyond the reach of the Lebanese army and police. “Life for the Palestinians was deliberately frozen for political manipulation,” concludes Lebanese analyst Tony Badran. “Syria has no interest in normalising that situation.”

While Syria imposes a measure of security on its Palestinian neighbourhoods, it foments insecurity and violence in Lebanon and Gaza, splitting the Palestinian polity and fuelling the misery of Palestinians throughout the region.

•••

Jordan is the only Arab nation that has integrated large numbers of Palestinians as full-fledged citizens. This is due not only to the unification of the East Bank and West Bank of the Jordan River valley under Hashemite rule between the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 until Israel’s occupation of West Bank in 1967, but also to the luck of having had an enlightened monarch committed to the compassionate treatment of the estimated 100,000 refugees who crossed the Jordan River during the nakba in 1948. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank following the 1967 war triggered a second exodus of 140,000 refugees into Jordan.

Today, almost 2 million of Jordan’s 6 million people are registered Palestinian refugees, the largest concentration of current and former refugees in the Palestinian diaspora – and increasingly, tensions have deepened between the Palestinians and the “East Bank” establishment. This summer in Amman, ambiguous declarations by the recently appointed minister of the interior, Nayef al-Kadi, who is widely perceived to be anti-Palestinian, led many Jordanians of Palestinian origin to fear they would be stripped of Jordanian identity numbers. Speaking to the London-based Arabic-language newspaper Al Hayat, al-Kadi confirmed that some Palestinians would be stripped of citizenship, ostensibly to counter Israeli plans to turn Jordan into Palestine. “We should be thanked for taking this measure,” he said. “We are fulfilling our national duty because Israel wants to expel the Palestinians from their homeland.” Panic about their status spread quickly among the Palestinian community.

In interviews this month, senior Jordanian officials sought to quell such fears, while also suggesting there was at least some substance to al-Kadi’s explosive suggestion. Faisal Bakr Qadi, the director of the Interior Ministry’s office of Inspections, said Palestinians in Jordan were not being systematically stripped of citizenship. Rather, he explained that the government’s current review of Palestinian national status dated back to 1988, when King Hussein, in response to demands by Palestinian and Arab leaders, disengaged administratively from the West Bank. Palestinian refugees, he said, meaning those who came to Jordan in the 1948 exodus, were to remain “full Jordanian citizens”. “Displaced” Palestinians, or those who had come in 1967 and afterwards, would be able to maintain their yellow identity cards and numbers and de facto citizenship, provided they returned to the West Bank to renew the Israeli passes that permit them to go back and forth between Jordan and the West Bank.

Since 1983, he said, Jordan had given the coveted yellow cards – which enable Palestinians to work without special permits, pay local tuition rates in school, and enjoy full government services – to 280,000 Palestinians, whereas it had “frozen” the cards – or downgraded their status – of only 15,856 people. So far this year, he said, 9,956 cards were upgraded, 291 downgraded.

While many diplomats doubt these numbers, Jordanians insist there is no plot or plan to expel or deny citizenship to Palestinians who have lived virtually their entire lives in Jordan. “We want to ensure that when and if the peace process succeeds in establishing an independent Palestinian state, Palestinians living in Jordan will be in a position to choose their citizenship by having their status in order in both Jordan and Palestine,” said an official close to King Abdullah.

Yet the distinctions that seem meaningful in Amman are not clear to some of the almost 94,000 Palestinian residents of Baqa’a, the largest of the 10 official refugee camps run by the UN. Some Palestinians in Baqa’a complain about the “new regulations” and the lack of identity cards that enable them to work without special permits and educate their children in public schools. Anxiety about the future pervades this ramshackle suburb at the northern edge of Amman, which began as an emergency relief centre after the 1967 war and is now a sprawling mini-city with its own basic shops, shawarma (sandwich) stands, and services. Many of the people we spoke to claimed that they knew someone, or had a relative, neighbour and friend whose identity card had been revoked, or whose status had inexplicably been changed.

For many of these refugees at the bottom of Jordan’s social and economic pecking order, life without papers means hiding from the police who constantly patrol their camp’s streets, being too poor to send any of your eight to 10 children to college, a lifetime of menial labour, and only a threadbare dream of returning to a homeland that most of them have never seen. There is strong suspicion of the state, but also of their neighbours, who are divided into “‘48 people” and “‘67 people”. “Some of the newcomers would give away Al Aqsa for a Jordanian identity card,” says Heba, a mother of eight, mentioning Islam’s celebrated mosque in Jerusalem, one of its holiest shrines.

“We’re Jordanians,” says her son, Mustapha, a slender, 20-year-old in a bright orange T-shirt emblazoned with meaningless words in unknown languages. “This is the best place in the world,” he says, pointing around the bare living room whose worn rugs and threadbare pillows cover the floor on which he and all his siblings sleep. “We would never leave here. But I’m loyal to my country, and I would like to visit it one day.”

He seems perplexed when asked which is his country – Jordan or Palestine. “We have no security here, but we are Jordanians,” replies Mustapha, who lounges on a mattress in a two-storey cement house down the road while one of his five daughters offers tiny glasses of steaming herbal tea and cardamom-scented coffee. “Everything I have is here. This house. My car. My job. What would I have in Nablus or Be’ersheba?” he declares. “My children know nothing but Jordan. And we will stay here.”

That determination, echoed repeatedly through the dilapidated cement homes that line Baqa’a’s gravelly streets and dust-filled shops, is precisely what terrifies Jordan’s East Bank establishment. Jordanians have reason to fear their Palestinian guests. Many Jordanians have not forgotten “Black September”, the civil war launched by Arafat’s Fatah organisation in 1970 which nearly toppled King Hussein’s kingdom.

Moreover, having grown accustomed to their near monopoly on jobs provided by the government, Jordan’s largest employer, Jordanians fear demands for political equality from Palestinians, most of whom would probably choose to remain in Jordan, relinquishing their “right of return’ in favour of compensation. An end to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict would surely threaten Jordan’s informal division of power: East Bankers dominate the army, the security services and most civil-service posts, while Palestinians are disproportionately represented in business. Palestinians may advise the king in the royal court, but there has been only one Palestinian prime minister, who served for eight months. Palestinians now comprise only 23 of Jordan’s 110 MPs.

“The closer we get to a solution,” says Adnan Abu Odeh, a Palestinian who was one of King Hussein’s royal court chiefs and also held other important government posts, “the more anxious society becomes. We are approaching a moment of truth.”

.

AFP

A young Palestinian refugee leans on the wall of her house at the Wihdat refugee camp in Amman

Women grieve following the 1985 massacre at the Chatila refugee camp in Beirut

Protesters waving Palestinian flags in a demonstration against Israel’s Gaza offensive, in the Emirati capital Abu Dhabi last January

A young refugee at al-Baqa’a, Jordan. The graffiti, on a school wall, reads: ‘I will not stay a refugee for ever’

.

A young protester holds an M-16 rifle

Students at a United Nations school in the Shati refugee camp

A man waits to receive food supplies at the UNRWA headquarters in Gaza

On the road: Palestinian deportees march to a Lebanese checkpoint

Abu Yousef and his wife hold keys to their house in pre-1948 Palestine at a refugee camp in Amman

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/no-way-home-the-tragedy-of-the-palestinian-diaspora-1806790.html

Tags: the, diaspora, home:, no, of, palestinian, tragedy, way

You might think Palestinian refugees would be welcomed by their Arab neighbours, yet they are denied basic rights and citizenship

A special report by Judith Miller and David Samuels

Thursday, 22 October 2009

It is a cynical but time-honoured practice in Middle Eastern politics: the statesmen who decry the political and humanitarian crisis of the approximately 3.9 million Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in Gaza ignore the plight of an estimated 4.6 million Palestinians who live in Arab countries. For decades, Arab governments have justified their decision to maintain millions of stateless Palestinians as refugees in squalid camps as a means of applying pressure to Israel. The refugee problem will be solved, they say, when Israel agrees to let the Palestinians have their own state.

Yet in the two decades since the end of the Cold War, after two Gulf wars, and the rise and fall of the Oslo peace process, not a single Palestinian refugee has returned to Israel – and only a handful of ageing political functionaries have returned from neighbouring Arab countries to the West Bank and Gaza. Instead, failed peace plans and shifting political priorities have resulted in a second Palestinian “Nakba”, or catastrophe – this one at hands of the Arab governments. “Marginalised, deprived of basic political and economic rights, trapped in the camps, bereft of realistic prospects, heavily armed and standing atop multiple fault lines,” a report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) in Lebanon recently observed, “the refugee population constitutes a time bomb.”

The fact that the divided Palestinian political leadership is silent about the mistreatment of the refugees by Arab states does not make such behaviour any less reprehensible – or less dangerous. Some 250,000 Palestinians were chased out of Kuwait and other Gulf States to punish the Palestinian political leadership for supporting Saddam Hussein. Tens of thousands of Palestinian residents of Iraq were similarly dispossessed after the second Gulf war.

In 2001, Palestinians in Lebanon were stripped of the right to own property, or to pass on the property that they already owned to their children – and banned from working as doctors, lawyers, pharmacists or in 20 other professions. Even the Palestinian refugee community in Jordan, historically the most welcoming Arab state, has reason to feel insecure in the face of official threats to revoke their citizenship. The systematic refusal of Arab governments to grant basic human rights to Palestinians who are born and die in their countries – combined with periodic mass expulsions of entire Palestinian communities – recalls the treatment of Jews in medieval Europe. Along with dispossession and marginalisation has come a new and frightening turn away from the traditional forms of nationalism that once dominated the refugee camps towards the radical pan-Islamic ideology of al-Qa’ida.

Daniel C Kurtzer, who has served as US ambassador to both Israel and Egypt and now advises the Obama administration, says that all American governments have resisted dealing with what he calls the most sensitive issue in the conflict – the normalisation of the status of the Palestinians – through a right of return to Palestine, or citizenship in other countries. “The refugees hold the key to this conflict’s settlement,” he says, “and nobody knows what to do with them.”

In the unlikely event that President Obama’s vision of a swift and final settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict materialises, millions of Palestinians would still live in decaying refugee camps whose inhabitants are forbidden from owning land or participating in normal economic life. The only governing authority that Palestinians living in the camps have ever known is UNRWA – the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. Established by the UN on 8 December 1949 to assist 650,000 impoverished Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war, UNRWA has been battling budget cuts and strikes among its employees as it struggles to provide subsidies and services to Palestinian refugees, who are defined as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948″.

•••

The inclusion of the descendants of Palestinian refugees as refugees in UNRWA’s mandate has no parallel in international humanitarian law and is responsible for the growth of the official numbers of Palestinian refugees in foreign countries from 711,000 to 4.6 million during decades when the number of ageing refugees from the 1948 Israeli war of independence in was in fact declining. UNRWA’s grant of refugee status to the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the original Palestinian refugees according to the principle of patrilineal descent, with no limit on the generations that can obtain refugee status, has made it easy for host countries to flout their obligations under international law. According to Article 34 of the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, “The Contracting States shall as far as possible facilitate the assimilation and naturalisation of refugees,” and must “make every effort to expedite naturalisation proceedings” – the opposite of what happened to the Palestinians in every Arab country in which they settled, save Jordan. For all the easy criticism that can be levelled at UNRWA, it is hard to see how many Palestinian refugees would have survived without the agency’s help.

The responsibility for the legal dimensions of their fate lies elsewhere, as UNRWA Commissioner-General Karen AbuZayd made clear at UNRWA’s anniversary ceremony in New York on 24 September, before an audience that included Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Queen Rania of Jordan – herself a Palestinian. “The protracted exile of Palestine refugees and the dire conditions they endure, particularly in the occupied Palestinian territory, cannot be reconciled with state obligations under the UN Charter,” AbuZayd said. The result for the refugees, AbuZayd said at a forum the previous afternoon at the Princeton Club, is a “suspended state of existence” for which no one seems willing to accept political responsibility. The rest of the discussion, moderated by Ambassador Kurtner, made clear that anticipated solutions to the Palestinian refugee problem had failed to emerge – leaving a community in crisis.

“You can’t ignore an entire people because it’s awkward or inconvenient,” says Dr Karma Nabulsi, a lecturer at Oxford and a former Palestinian representative at the UN. In the period immediately after Oslo, she added, Palestinian refugees in Arab countries hoped to be repatriated to areas governed by the Palestinian Authority. Today, despair has replaced that initial optimism. “What young Palestinian would want to resettle in Gaza or in the West Bank?” she asks.

Sharing a panel with Dr Nabulsi, the doveish former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben Ami, who negotiated directly with Yasser Arafat at the failed Camp David meetings in 2000, asserted that Israel has suppressed narratives that would make clear its responsibility for the Palestinian refugee crisis of 1948. Indifference to the refugees’ plight, he added, was shared by Israel’s negotiating partner in the Oslo years – Yasser Arafat. “He was not a refugee man,” Ben Ami said flatly. “He was much more centred on the question of Jerusalem. I heard him say to [Mahmood Abbas] in my presence, ‘leave me alone with your refugees’.”

It is no secret that certain Arab regimes saw the Palestinians under Arafat’s leadership as an unwelcome occupation that stripped Jordan bare and destroyed Lebanon. Similarly, Arafat often used the threat of destabilisation and assassination to get Arab regimes to fund the Palestinian cause. Still, the record of Arafat’s Palestinian Authority in its territories during the 1990s attests to the truth of Ben Ami’s observation, which applies both to Arafat’s Fatah and to Hamas. Despite $10bn in foreign aid, not one refugee camp in the West Bank or Gaza has been replaced by modern housing. On the West Bank, chances for normal Palestinian communal life have been shattered by Israeli settlements, arrests, checkpoints and roadblocks, and by 15 years of abuses by Fatah. Even under the best of circumstances, an influx of refugees would further destabilise a Palestinian economy that is kept afloat by the world’s highest per capita receipts of foreign aid.

Daniel Kurtzer agrees no one is likely to make a deal that includes a substantial return of the Palestinian diaspora. “Most Palestinian refugees know it, as do the settlers,” he says. So rather than wait for American mediators or Arab states to impose solutions on them, the Palestinians themselves should begin to tackle the diabolically difficult issues inherent in the resolution of their political and economic future. “What we need is a refugee summit,” he says. “I’m looking for a real conversation that must start internally and soon.”

After 60 years of failed wars, and failed peace, it is time to put politics aside and to insist that the basic rights of the Palestinian refugees in Arab countries be respected – whether or not their children’s children return to Haifa anytime soon. While Saudi Arabia may not wish to host Israeli tourists, it can easily afford to integrate the estimated 240,000 Palestinian refugees who already live in the kingdom – just as Egypt, which has received close to $60bn in US aid, and has a population of 81 million, can grant legal rights to an estimated 70,000 Palestinian refugees and their descendants. One can only imagine the outrage that the world community would rightly visit upon Israel if Israeli Arabs were subject to the vile discriminatory laws applied to Palestinians living in Arab countries. Surely, Palestinian Arabs can keep their own national dream alive in the countries where they were born, while also enjoying the freedom to work, vote and own property?

A practical solution to the crisis of the Palestinian refugees in Arab countries will focus on Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, which together play host to approximately 3 million of the estimated 4.6 million Palestinian refugees living outside the West Bank and Gaza. While each of these countries has chosen different legal and political approaches to the 1948 refugees and their descendants, they share a political desire to sublimate the rights of Palestinian residents, treating them as unwanted guests or as tools to be used in pursuing wider political interests – but rarely as fully-fledged members of society. Lebanon, where Palestinians led by Yasser Arafat are widely blamed for having sparked the 1975 civil war, is the worst offender against international norms. Yet even in Jordan, which is in many ways a model for the humane treatment of a large refugee population, Palestinians today feel markedly less secure than they did two decades ago, or even five years ago.

•••

Outside of Iraq, whose Palestinian population fled en masse after the fall of Saddam, nowhere has the situation of the Palestinian refugees worsened so dramatically as in Lebanon. Since the early Sixties, Palestinians there have been barred from working in medicine, dentistry and the law. In 2001, the Lebanese parliament adopted an amendment to the country’s property laws that prohibited the acquisition of real estate by “any person not a citizen of a recognised state” – meaning the estimated 250,000 to 400,000 Palestinians living in Lebanon. Palestinians who had acquired real estate prior to 2001 were barred from bequeathing property to their children.

Right-wing Christians and Shi’ite radicals alike support discriminatory legislation that further impoverishes Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, with the stated goal of preventing them from beginning the process of naturalisation, known as tawtin. In his inaugural speech in May, 2008, Lebanese President Michel Suleiman, a Christian and former head of the country’s armed forces, reaffirmed “Lebanon’s categorical refusal of naturalisation”, a statement echoed by the former Lebanese ambassador to the US, Nassib Lahoud, who told us recently in Beirut: “The confessional balance does not allow these things to happen … at the moment the Palestinians are citizens of a state that does not exist.” His sentiments were echoed by Hizbollah’s spokesman on the Palestinian question, Hassan Hodroj. “The threat of tawtin is genuine,” Hodroj explained. “It is one of the ways in which Israel, backed by the US, is endangering the region.”

The fact that the living standard of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon has been deemed “catastrophic” by both UNRWA and by the Lebanese government can therefore be understood as a deliberate result of official state policy that is supported by all parties across Lebanon’s divided confessional spectrum. As a member of the Lebanese parliament, Ghassan Moukheiber, explained in an interview with the ICG, “our official policy is to maintain Palestinians in a vulnerable, precarious situation to diminish prospects for their naturalisation or permanent settlement”.

Yet the results of this horrifying policy may not be confined to Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. In his book Everyday Jihad, about the experience of refugees in the Ain al-Hilweh camp, home to an estimated 70,000 Palestinians, the French scholar Bernard Rougier describes the results of decades of exclusion and marginalisation which have severed the refugees from any connection to a lost homeland – or the country in which they were born. As a result, he says, many Palestinians have abandoned a failed nationalism for the radical millenarian ideas associated with al-Qa’ida. “Palestinian salafist militants have devoted themselves to defending the imaginary borders of identity,” Rougier writes, “declaring themselves the protectors and guardians of the cause of Sunni Islam worldwide.”

Visitors to the Ain al-Hilweh camp are immediately made aware that they have entered another world. While Lebanese army checkpoints ring the camp, the Lebanese state has no presence inside. Food, water and other basic services are provided by UNRWA, while armed factions openly display weapons in muddy alleyways and recruit generations to serve under their banners. It is easy to see why the secular promise of Palestinian nationalism has faded and why the promise of a Muslim paradise without borders might take its place. One of the 9/11 hijackers dedicated a poem to Ain al-Hilweh’s most prominent jihadist in his videotaped will, and dozens of Palestinian fighters from the camp joined al-Qa’ida in Iraq.

“The situation is the camp is deteriorating,” Rougier told us, when we asked about whether things were getting better or worse for the Palestinians of Lebanon. Bound by their absolute opposition to tawtin, he says, Lebanese leaders are creating a radicalised Palestinian population that will eventually have to be absorbed into Lebanon, despite having little or no allegiance to the state.

Sahar Atrache, lead author of the ICG report on the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, agrees. “Palestinians refugees in Lebanon lack means of socio-economic advancement and are bereft of hope,” he says. “They are vulnerable on all counts – politically, legally and above all physically. The status quo is good neither for the refugees nor for Lebanon itself.”

•••

While Palestinian refugees and their descendants inside Syria are not allowed to vote or hold Syrian passports, they are free from the overt discrimination that has turned Lebanon into a recruiting ground for al-Qa’ida. The legal status of Palestinians inside Syria is defined by a 1956 law that states that grants them “the right to employment, commerce, and national service, while preserving their original nationality”. More than 100,000 of the estimated 450,000 Palestinians in Syria live in or around the Yarmouk refugee camp, which long ago became a neighbourhood of Damascus.

While Palestinians are reasonably well integrated into the Syrian socio-economic structure, according to the scholar Laurie Brand they do not have the right to vote, nor can they stand for parliament or other political offices. Palestinians are barred from buying farmland and prohibited from owning more than one house. The female descendant of a Palestinian refugee can become a Syrian citizen by marrying a Syrian man. The male descendants of Palestinian men and their children are barred from acquiring Syrian citizenship, even if they marry Syrian women.

The major focus of Syrian interest in the Palestinian refugees has long been as an extension of the Assad regime’s policy towards its neighbours – Israel and Lebanon. Damascus has long hosted a variety of Palestinian terror groups that rejected the Oslo process, including Ahmad Jibril’s Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC). More significantly, Damascus is also the political and logistical centre for Hamas. “Syria’s support for armed Palestinian groups is key to pressuring Damascus’ neighbours, most notably Israel and Lebanon,” says Andrew Tabler, author of the Syria-watching blog Eighth Gate.

Syria increases its leverage inside Israel by weakening Fatah and strengthening Hamas. In Lebanon, Syrian military and political interference has turned the refugee camps into “security-free islands” (juzur amniya) where bombers can be recruited, bombs manufactured, and plots can be directed beyond the reach of the Lebanese army and police. “Life for the Palestinians was deliberately frozen for political manipulation,” concludes Lebanese analyst Tony Badran. “Syria has no interest in normalising that situation.”

While Syria imposes a measure of security on its Palestinian neighbourhoods, it foments insecurity and violence in Lebanon and Gaza, splitting the Palestinian polity and fuelling the misery of Palestinians throughout the region.

•••

Jordan is the only Arab nation that has integrated large numbers of Palestinians as full-fledged citizens. This is due not only to the unification of the East Bank and West Bank of the Jordan River valley under Hashemite rule between the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 until Israel’s occupation of West Bank in 1967, but also to the luck of having had an enlightened monarch committed to the compassionate treatment of the estimated 100,000 refugees who crossed the Jordan River during the nakba in 1948. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank following the 1967 war triggered a second exodus of 140,000 refugees into Jordan.

Today, almost 2 million of Jordan’s 6 million people are registered Palestinian refugees, the largest concentration of current and former refugees in the Palestinian diaspora – and increasingly, tensions have deepened between the Palestinians and the “East Bank” establishment. This summer in Amman, ambiguous declarations by the recently appointed minister of the interior, Nayef al-Kadi, who is widely perceived to be anti-Palestinian, led many Jordanians of Palestinian origin to fear they would be stripped of Jordanian identity numbers. Speaking to the London-based Arabic-language newspaper Al Hayat, al-Kadi confirmed that some Palestinians would be stripped of citizenship, ostensibly to counter Israeli plans to turn Jordan into Palestine. “We should be thanked for taking this measure,” he said. “We are fulfilling our national duty because Israel wants to expel the Palestinians from their homeland.” Panic about their status spread quickly among the Palestinian community.

In interviews this month, senior Jordanian officials sought to quell such fears, while also suggesting there was at least some substance to al-Kadi’s explosive suggestion. Faisal Bakr Qadi, the director of the Interior Ministry’s office of Inspections, said Palestinians in Jordan were not being systematically stripped of citizenship. Rather, he explained that the government’s current review of Palestinian national status dated back to 1988, when King Hussein, in response to demands by Palestinian and Arab leaders, disengaged administratively from the West Bank. Palestinian refugees, he said, meaning those who came to Jordan in the 1948 exodus, were to remain “full Jordanian citizens”. “Displaced” Palestinians, or those who had come in 1967 and afterwards, would be able to maintain their yellow identity cards and numbers and de facto citizenship, provided they returned to the West Bank to renew the Israeli passes that permit them to go back and forth between Jordan and the West Bank.

Since 1983, he said, Jordan had given the coveted yellow cards – which enable Palestinians to work without special permits, pay local tuition rates in school, and enjoy full government services – to 280,000 Palestinians, whereas it had “frozen” the cards – or downgraded their status – of only 15,856 people. So far this year, he said, 9,956 cards were upgraded, 291 downgraded.

While many diplomats doubt these numbers, Jordanians insist there is no plot or plan to expel or deny citizenship to Palestinians who have lived virtually their entire lives in Jordan. “We want to ensure that when and if the peace process succeeds in establishing an independent Palestinian state, Palestinians living in Jordan will be in a position to choose their citizenship by having their status in order in both Jordan and Palestine,” said an official close to King Abdullah.

Yet the distinctions that seem meaningful in Amman are not clear to some of the almost 94,000 Palestinian residents of Baqa’a, the largest of the 10 official refugee camps run by the UN. Some Palestinians in Baqa’a complain about the “new regulations” and the lack of identity cards that enable them to work without special permits and educate their children in public schools. Anxiety about the future pervades this ramshackle suburb at the northern edge of Amman, which began as an emergency relief centre after the 1967 war and is now a sprawling mini-city with its own basic shops, shawarma (sandwich) stands, and services. Many of the people we spoke to claimed that they knew someone, or had a relative, neighbour and friend whose identity card had been revoked, or whose status had inexplicably been changed.

For many of these refugees at the bottom of Jordan’s social and economic pecking order, life without papers means hiding from the police who constantly patrol their camp’s streets, being too poor to send any of your eight to 10 children to college, a lifetime of menial labour, and only a threadbare dream of returning to a homeland that most of them have never seen. There is strong suspicion of the state, but also of their neighbours, who are divided into “‘48 people” and “‘67 people”. “Some of the newcomers would give away Al Aqsa for a Jordanian identity card,” says Heba, a mother of eight, mentioning Islam’s celebrated mosque in Jerusalem, one of its holiest shrines.

“We’re Jordanians,” says her son, Mustapha, a slender, 20-year-old in a bright orange T-shirt emblazoned with meaningless words in unknown languages. “This is the best place in the world,” he says, pointing around the bare living room whose worn rugs and threadbare pillows cover the floor on which he and all his siblings sleep. “We would never leave here. But I’m loyal to my country, and I would like to visit it one day.”

He seems perplexed when asked which is his country – Jordan or Palestine. “We have no security here, but we are Jordanians,” replies Mustapha, who lounges on a mattress in a two-storey cement house down the road while one of his five daughters offers tiny glasses of steaming herbal tea and cardamom-scented coffee. “Everything I have is here. This house. My car. My job. What would I have in Nablus or Be’ersheba?” he declares. “My children know nothing but Jordan. And we will stay here.”

That determination, echoed repeatedly through the dilapidated cement homes that line Baqa’a’s gravelly streets and dust-filled shops, is precisely what terrifies Jordan’s East Bank establishment. Jordanians have reason to fear their Palestinian guests. Many Jordanians have not forgotten “Black September”, the civil war launched by Arafat’s Fatah organisation in 1970 which nearly toppled King Hussein’s kingdom.

Moreover, having grown accustomed to their near monopoly on jobs provided by the government, Jordan’s largest employer, Jordanians fear demands for political equality from Palestinians, most of whom would probably choose to remain in Jordan, relinquishing their “right of return’ in favour of compensation. An end to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict would surely threaten Jordan’s informal division of power: East Bankers dominate the army, the security services and most civil-service posts, while Palestinians are disproportionately represented in business. Palestinians may advise the king in the royal court, but there has been only one Palestinian prime minister, who served for eight months. Palestinians now comprise only 23 of Jordan’s 110 MPs.

“The closer we get to a solution,” says Adnan Abu Odeh, a Palestinian who was one of King Hussein’s royal court chiefs and also held other important government posts, “the more anxious society becomes. We are approaching a moment of truth.”

.

AFP

A young Palestinian refugee leans on the wall of her house at the Wihdat refugee camp in Amman

Women grieve following the 1985 massacre at the Chatila refugee camp in Beirut

Protesters waving Palestinian flags in a demonstration against Israel’s Gaza offensive, in the Emirati capital Abu Dhabi last January

A young refugee at al-Baqa’a, Jordan. The graffiti, on a school wall, reads: ‘I will not stay a refugee for ever’

.

A young protester holds an M-16 rifle

Students at a United Nations school in the Shati refugee camp

A man waits to receive food supplies at the UNRWA headquarters in Gaza

On the road: Palestinian deportees march to a Lebanese checkpoint

Abu Yousef and his wife hold keys to their house in pre-1948 Palestine at a refugee camp in Amman

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/no-way-home-the-tragedy-of-the-palestinian-diaspora-1806790.html

Tags: the, diaspora, home:, no, of, palestinian, tragedy, way

By Omar Barghouti

Introduction

As Israel shifts steadily to the fanatic, racist right, as the latest parliamentary election results have shown, Palestinians under its control are increasingly being brutalized by its escalating colonial and apartheid policies, designed to push them out of their homeland to make a self-fulfilling prophecy out of the old Zionist canard of “a land without a people.” In parallel, international civil society, according to numerous indicators, is reaching a turning point in its view of Israel as a pariah state acting above the law of nations and in its effective action, accordingly, to penalize and ostracize it as it did to apartheid South Africa.

Palestinian communities in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Hebron, the Jordan Valley and the Naqab (Negev), among others, have been recently subjected to some of the worst, ongoing Israeli campaigns of gradual ethnic cleansing intended to “Judaize” their space. Qalqilya is suffocated by the colonial apartheid Wall that surrounds it from all sides, while Nablus is under constant siege. A few months ago, the Palestinian community in Acre was brutally attacked by Jewish-Israeli fundamentalists and xenophobes in one of the worst pogroms witnessed by Palestinians inside Israel. Still, Gaza today stands out as the test of our common humanity and our indispensable morality. A thorough analysis of the role played by Western and some Arab governments in regards to Israel’s criminal war of aggression against Gaza will demonstrate a resounding failure on both accounts. Throughout the atrocious assault, the official West, along with the governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority and the UN leadership,[1] were willing accomplices in Israel’s grave violations of international law and basic human rights.

In words that can quite accurately be used to describe Israel, Robert Kagan, a leading neo-conservative ideologue, justifies hegemonic tendencies as a prerogative of the mightiest [2]:

“The United States remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might.”

True to this paradigm, Israel has for decades maintained a regime of occupation, colonization and apartheid over the indigenous people of Palestine through the “possession and use of military might,” in addition to the indispensable collusion of Western powers, whose unconditional largesse has for six decades enabled Israel to maintain and develop its multi-faceted system of colonial oppression against the Palestinian people.

By contributing to Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza and its criminal war against it, the EU and other Western states have reached a qualitatively different stage of complicity, becoming, more blatantly than ever, full partners in the US-Israeli policy of undermining the rule of law and espousing in its stead the law of the jungle, thereby promoting the Bush-Bin Laden self-fulfilling prophecy of a dichotomous world divided surgically into good and evil, with each side regarding the other as evil.

In response to this fatal alliance of savage capitalism in the West with Israeli racism, exclusion and colonial subjugation, the global movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions, BDS, against Israel presents not only a progressive, anti racist [3], sophisticated, sustainable, moral and effective form of civil, non-violent resistance, but a real chance of becoming the political catalyst and moral anchor for a strengthened, reinvigorated international social movement capable of reaffirming the rights of all humans to freedom, equality and dignity and the right of nations to self determination.

Gaza: the West’s Complicity in War Crimes

As early as 2007, Richard Falk, a prominent international law expert at Princeton University and the current UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT), called the Western-supported Israeli siege of Gaza “a prelude to genocide”[4] and, later, “a Holocaust in the making.”[5] Falk, who happens to be Jewish, argued that the siege is especially disturbing because it vividly expresses “a deliberate intention on the part of Israel and its allies to subject an entire human community to life-endangering conditions of utmost cruelty.”[6]

Using more diplomatic language, Sara Roy [7], a Harvard University expert on development in the OPT, accuses the EU, along with the US, of complicity in a deliberate Israeli policy of “de-development” of the OPT, killing any possibility of creating an independent and sovereign Palestinian state. By providing the Palestinians with “tangible benefits such as higher income and improved infrastructure,” Roy argues, the EU was hoping to buy Palestinian support for substantial concessions in the so-called “peace negotiations.” She concludes, “The logic of international law was abandoned in the interest of maintaining a failed political process.”

An examination of the Israeli siege of Gaza, most of whose population are refugees forcibly displaced [8] by Zionists — and later Israel — during the 1948 Nakba, can elucidate this “de-development” policy which amounts to collective punishment, as most legal experts agree. During this ongoing — now 21-month-old — siege, more than 80% of the 1.5 million Palestinians caged into the world’s “largest open-air prison” have been pushed into poverty and dependency on international humanitarian assistance; the entire economic infrastructure has been systematically decimated, with more than 95% of the factories forced to shut down, driving poverty and unemployment below sub-Saharan African standards; educational institutions have been unable to function properly due to lack of fuel and electricity for prolonged periods; the health care system is on the verge of collapse, and hundreds of patients in need of critical health care, particularly cancer and kidney patients, have died after being denied access to medical facilities outside Gaza.

The longer term effects of the siege are even more daunting.[9] According to the World Health Organization chronic malnutrition and dietary-related diseases have alarmingly increased, resulting in rampant low birth weights; anemia in more than two thirds of all children age one year and younger; and stunted growth in close to 13.2% of children under age five. Moreover, preventable diseases, caused by polluted water and inadequate sewage processing, started spreading wildly. Thousands, mainly children, have suffered serious hearing problems due to Israel’s once concentrated use of sonic booms for weeks on end. A whole generation of Palestinian children in Gaza will suffer severe developmental and psychological disorders for many years to come, health studies have shown. There is also a significant increase already in the rate of incidence of cancer and other deadly diseases directly related to Israeli-inflicted pollution and health care denial.

Reacting to the devastating impact of Israel’s siege, Karen Abu Zayd, the Commissioner-General of UNRWA, warned [10]:

“Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution with the knowledge, acquiescence and — some would say — encouragement of the international community. …Humanitarian and human development work was never meant to function in an environment devoid of constructive efforts to resolve conflict or to address its underlying causes. Indeed, humanitarian work is profoundly undermined in a context where there is implicit or active complicity in creating conditions of mass suffering.”

It is this aspect of the siege, the processes leading to the slow death of masses of people and to inhibiting the development of a generation of Palestinian children that prompted Falk’s eye-opening description of Israel’s siege as constituting acts of genocide.

Former Israeli education minister and leftist leader, Shulamit Aloni, adopted years ago this designation of Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians under its occupation. As early as 2003, she condemned an Israeli atrocity that pales in comparison with the Israeli massacres just committed in Gaza saying [11]:

“So it’s not yet genocide of the terrible and unique style of which we were past victims. And as one of the smart [Israeli] Generals told me, we do not have crematoria and gas chambers. Is anything less than that consistent with Jewish ethics? Did he ever hear how an entire people said that it did not know what was done in its name?”

And that was before Israel’s rolling massacre in Gaza.

According to respected human rights organizations active in the field, Israel’s 23-day military offensive, which started on December 27, 2008, led to the death of more than 1,400 Palestinians, approximately 83% of whom are civilians [12], and to the complete or partial destruction of thousands of homes; the leading university; 45 mosques; several ministries, including those of education and justice; scores of schools[13]; a Red Crescent Hospital and tens of ambulances [14] and clinics; as well as thousands of factories and small businesses. Several massacres were committed and well documented. The ICRC [15] accused Israel, in an unusually sharp tone, of failing to provide medical care to the injured and impeding medical relief from reaching them, thereby causing their bleeding to death, both severe violations of international humanitarian law. More than 400 Palestinian children were killed by the three-week long Israeli bombing, many due to burns caused by Israel’s illegal use of phosphorous bombs.

On the opening day of its assault on Gaza, the Israeli military caused massive destruction of civilian infrastructure and massacred close to 200 Palestinian civilians, many of whom were non-combatant police trainees, while no Israeli civilians were reportedly killed. Nevertheless, Western leaders were quick to issue statements expressing concern about the loss of life and suffering on “both sides,” blaming the Palestinian resistance for provoking the atrocities, and absolving Israel of any responsibility under the pretext of its “right to defend itself.”

Leading international jurists [16], however, categorically rejected Israel’s self-defense argument, accusing it of committing war crimes. The UN Human Rights Council and the UN Secretary General have called for impartial, independent war crimes investigations. Amnesty International [17], Human Rights Watch [18], the main Israeli human rights organization, B’Tselem [19], the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network[20], among many others, have similarly accused Israel of committing war crimes, completely refuting its self-defense claim, particularly since it was Israel that first violated the June 2008 ceasefire with Hamas on November 4th, when it attacked and killed 6 resistance fighters without any provocation.

Gerald Kaufman, a senior Jewish Labor Party member of the British Parliament compared some Israeli actions to those of Nazis. [21] So did Noam Chomsky [22] and Holocaust survivor and senior academic, Hajo Meyer [23], of A Different Jewish Voice in the Netherlands. Echoing Kaufman, Chomsky and Meyer, prominent Jewish British intellectuals and academics compared Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto in a letter to the Guardian [24], as did the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network on this year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. [25]

Israel’s Other Colonial and Apartheid Policies

Gaza aside, Palestinian civil society and a growing number of influential human rights advocates recognize that Israel’s regime over the indigenous people of Palestine constitutes occupation, colonization and apartheid. Specifically, Israel’s decades-old oppression takes three basic forms which were at the core of the Palestinian BDS Call [26]:

(1) The prolonged occupation and colonization of Gaza and the West Bank, including east Jerusalem, and other Arab territories;
(2) The system of racial discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel; and
(3) The persistent denial of the UN-sanctioned rights of the Palestinian refugees, paramount among which is their right to reparations and to return to their homes of origin, in accordance with UNGA Res. 194.

Ending these three forms of oppression is the minimal requirement to achieve a just peace in our region.

The most important of all three injustices is without doubt Israel’s denial of the right of Palestinian refugees to return. The core of the question of Palestine has always been the plight of the refugees who were ethnically cleansed during the Nakba and ever since. The fact that refugees form a majority of the Palestinian people coupled with their 60-year old suffering in exile make the recognition of their basic rights, including their right to reparations and return to their homes of origin, the litmus test of morality for anyone suggesting a just and enduring solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Moral and legal rights aside, the denial of Palestinian refugee rights guarantees the perpetuation of conflict. [27]

As to the occupation [28], nothing quite captures its immense injustice as much as Israel’s colonial Wall. Despite the Wall’s grave repercussions on Palestinian livelihood, environment, and political rights, a near total consensus [29] exists amongst Israeli Jews in its support. The former Israeli environment minister, Yehudit Naot, however, protested a specific aspect of the Wall, saying [30]:

“The separation fence severs the continuity of open areas and is harmful to the landscape, the flora and fauna, the ecological corridors and the drainage of the creeks. The protective system will irreversibly affect the land resource and create enclaves of communities that are cut off from their surroundings.”

Even after irises were moved and passages for small animals were created, the spokesperson for the Israel Nature and National Parks Protection Authority still complained [31]:

“The animals don’t know that there is now a border. They are used to a certain living space, and what we are concerned about is that their genetic diversity will be affected because different population groups will not be able to mate and reproduce. Isolating the populations on two sides of a fence definitely creates a genetic problem.”

While so attuned to the welfare of wild flowers and rabbits, Israel treated Palestinian children as dispensable creatures. Professionally-trained sharpshooters fatally targeted them in minor stone-throwing incidences. For example, medical sources [32] and human rights organizations, including Physicians for Human Rights, have documented in the first stage of the current Palestinian intifada a pattern of targeting the eyes [33] and knees of Palestinian children with a “clear intention” to harm. [34]

And when there was no stone-throwing incident to hide behind, Israeli soldiers had to provoke one. The veteran American journalist Chris Hedges exposed [35] how Israeli troops before their redeployment out of Gaza had methodically provoked Palestinian children playing in the dunes of the Rafah area in order to shoot them, concluding: “Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered […] but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.”

Israel’s repressive and racist policies in the 1967-occupied Palestinian territory have been recognized as constituting apartheid by a host of opinion leaders such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former US president, Jimmy Carter, and former UN Special Rapporteur for human rights, Prof. John Dugard, among others. In the same vein, former Israeli Attorney General, Michael Ben-Yair, wrote in a 2002 article in Ha’aretz describing Israel’s regime in the OPT, “We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities. … In effect, we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories….” [36]

However, the applicability of the crime of apartheid as defined in UN conventions to Israel itself has, for the most part, been either inadvertently glossed over or intentionally ignored as an explosive subject that has every potential to invite the vengeful wrath of powerful pro-Israel lobbies. Regardless, one cannot but examine the facts and analyze Israel’s system of governance accordingly.

The strongest argument given by — sometimes well-meaning — experts who dismiss the apartheid label for Israel is that the analogy between Israel and South Africa is not exact and, in many respects, Israel’s oppression is even more severe, demanding a different designation altogether. The problem with this argument is that it assumes, quite incorrectly, that apartheid is a South African trademark and, therefore, that every regime accused of practicing apartheid must be shown to be identical to South Africa’s apartheid regime of yesteryear. Apartheid, however, although brought to world attention and given its name by the racist regime in South Africa, has been recognized by the UN for decades as a generalized crime with a universal definition.

The Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid of 1976 defines apartheid [37] as “similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practised in southern Africa” which have “the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them, in particular by means such as segregation, expropriation of land, and denial of the right to leave and return to their country, the right to a nationality and the right to freedom of movement and residence” (Article II). The similarity to South Africa is cited not as a condition but in recognition of its status as a historic precedent.

As a recent in-depth strategic position paper [38] published by the Palestinian BDS National Committee states, Israel’s origins, laws and policies against the Palestinian people fit to a large extent the definition of apartheid. The conceptual origins of Israel’s unique form of apartheid are found in Zionism, a racist European ideology that was adopted by the dominant stream of the Zionist movement (World Zionist Organization, Jewish Agency, Jewish National Fund, among others) in order to justify and recruit political support for its colonial project of establishing an exclusive Jewish state in historic Palestine. Political Zionists dismissed the indigenous population of Palestine as non-existent in the famous Zionist slogan of “a land without a people;” making this a self-fulfilling prophecy, Zionist forces forcibly displaced 750,000-900,000 Palestinians from their homeland and destroyed hundreds of the depopulated Palestinian villages in an operation termed “cleaning the landscape” that lasted until 1960. [39]

Israel’s regime over the Palestinian people amounts to apartheid precisely because it displays many of the main features of the crime as defined by international law:

1. Racial discrimination against the indigenous Palestinian people who became citizens of the State of Israel was formalized and institutionalized through the creation by law of a “Jewish nationality”, which is distinct from Israeli citizenship. No “Israeli” nationality exists in Israel, and the Supreme Court has persistently refused to recognize one as it would end the system of Jewish supremacy in Israel. The 1950 Law of Return entitles all Jews — and only Jews — to the rights of nationals, namely the right to enter “Eretz Yisrael” (Israel and the OPT) and immediately enjoy full legal and political rights. “Jewish nationality” under the Law of Return is extraterritorial in contravention of international public law norms pertaining to nationality. It includes Jewish citizens of other countries, irrespective of whether they wish to be part of the collective of “Jewish nationals,” and excludes “non-Jews” (i.e., Palestinians) from nationality rights in Israel.

2. The 1952 Citizenship Law [40] has created a discriminatory two-tier legal system whereby Jews hold nationality and citizenship, while the remaining indigenous Palestinian citizens hold only citizenship. [41] Under Israeli law the status of Jewish nationality is accompanied with first-class rights and benefits which are not granted to Palestinian citizens.

3. The Israeli Status Law of 1952 authorizes the World Zionist Organization/Jewish Agency and its subsidiaries, including the Jewish National Fund, to control most of the land in Israel, for the exclusive benefit of Jews. In 1998, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, CESCR, expressed [42] grave concern about this law and stated that large-scale and systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and property by the State and the transfer of that property to these agencies constitute an institutionalized form of discrimination, because these agencies by definition would deny the use of these properties to non-Jewish citizens of the State.

4. Return of Palestinian refugees and Internally-Displaced Persons (IDPs), as required by international law, has been prevented by means of force and legislation on racist grounds. Simply because they are not Jews, Palestinian refugees were excluded from entitlement to citizenship in the State of Israel under the 1952 Citizenship Law. They were “denationalized” and turned into stateless refugees in violation of the law of state succession. Their land and other property were confiscated by the State. The approximately 150,000 Palestinians who remained in Israel after the 1948 Nakba were placed under a military regime (1948 – 1966) similar to the regime currently in place in the OPT.

For decades, racial discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel in every vital aspect of life has been the norm. From land ownership to education to health to jobs to housing, the indigenous Palestinians have been denied equality by the State’s laws and policies. For instance, they are not allowed, to buy or rent land in about 93% of the state lands of Israel. [43] To this date, polls consistently show overwhelming majorities of Israeli Jews standing in opposition to full equality with the indigenous Palestinians in the state. [44] So the fact those Palestinians can vote, unlike their black African counterpart under South African apartheid, becomes almost a formality, a tokenism of sorts, clearly designed to project a deceptive image of democracy and fend off well-justified accusations of apartheid. [45]

Even in cancer research [46], Israeli apartheid is strongly present. In June 2001, the Health Ministry published a map of the geographical distribution of malignant diseases in Israel during the years 1984-1999. The report did not include a single Palestinian community in Israel, with the exception of Rahat, ostensibly due to “budgetary problems.” This research is particularly important because, in Israel, only when a correlation is shown between the presence of polluting sites and the incidence of malignant disease is it possible to prevent installation of new hazards, or demand tighter environmental standards. By intentionally omitting Palestinian towns in its extensive cancer mapping, the Health Ministry has indirectly given a green light to polluters to relocate to Palestinian towns inside Israel — not to mention in the OPT. The results of such health apartheid are ominous. In the past three decades the rate of malignant diseases in the Palestinian population in Israel has risen 3 to 4 times higher than among the Jewish population. A spokesperson for the Israeli Center against Racism commented, “The report has produced two different groups. One, an overprivileged group, whose lives are dear to the state and to the Health Ministry; a second, whose lives are of no importance to the state.”

This discrimination must be seen in the wider context of Israel’s perception of Palestinians by leading Israeli politicians, intellectuals, academics and mass media outlets as a “demographic threat” that needs to be dealt with resolutely; thus the rise of openly fascist parties in the recent parliamentary elections. Echoing a popular view in Israel, a ranking academic, Major General (reserve) Shlomo Gazit from the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, preaches: “Democracy has to be subordinated to demography.”[47] And now, the fanatic right Israeli leader, Avigdor Lieberman, and his supporters are saying democracy has to be subordinated to loyalty to Jewish supremacy.

The complicity of Western governments in all this horrific violation of international law and basic human rights has led many analysts to view the role of the West as profoundly flawed, both morally and legally. The comprehensive impunity enjoyed by Israel has allowed it to project itself and to act as an uncontrollable “mad dog” — an image advocated by Moshe Dayan decades ago and endorsed most recently by Israeli military historian, Martin Van Creveld [48] — in an attempt to make the Palestinians submit to its colonial will, to accept slavery as fate.

This criminal impunity and categorical denial of rights, more than anything else, were the main motivation behind the Palestinian BDS campaign.

Since 9 July 2005, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions have been advocated by virtually the entire Palestinian civil society everywhere as an effective form of solidarity that has a real potential to bring about an end to Western complicity with Israel and, therefore, to Israel’s occupation, colonization and apartheid. During and ever since Israel’s criminal war on Gaza, Palestinian civil society has stood more united than ever in urging people of conscience all over the world to hold Israel accountable for its crimes by treating it as South Africa was under apartheid rule. In response, unions, academic groups, faith-based organizations, political parties, social movements and others have adopted creative, context-sensitive and sustainable BDS campaigns, from South Africa to Norway, from Australia to Canada, from Britain to Venezuela, and even from the podium of the President of the UN General Assembly. [49]

Israel’s state terrorism in Gaza, enabled by virtually unlimited support from the US and Western governments in general, was a key catalyst in spreading and deepening BDS around the world, prompting advocates of Palestinian rights to feel that our South Africa moment has finally arrived. Israel is now widely perceived, at a grassroots level, as an international pariah that commits war crimes with impunity and that needs to be held accountable to international law and basic principles of human rights.

The last few weeks alone witnessed some of the most significant indicators to date of this phenomenon. The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Ontario’s University Workers Coordinating Committee (OUWCC) at its annual conference last February endorsed [50] a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. A few days ago, the Fédération autonome du collégial (FAC), Quebec College Federation, also joined the BDS campaign. [51] In Durban, South Africa, the COSATU-affiliated dock workers union refused in early February to offload an Israeli cargo ship, [52] reminding us of similar sanctions taken against South African ships during the apartheid era. An Australian dock workers union and a group of American progressive union leaders endorsed the South African BDS action. In the US, Hampshire College set a historic precedent [53] by announcing its divestment from six companies profiting from the Israeli occupation. Significantly, Hampshire was also the first college in the US to divest from apartheid South Africa in the 1970s. In Wales, Cardiff University acceded [54] to demands by students and decided to divest from companies supporting the occupation. Even in France, where BDS had faced an uphill struggle for several years, a statement [55] was lately issued by leading academics explicitly endorsing BDS to end Israel’s impunity.

The latest spectacular entrenchment of the BDS campaign, especially since the Israeli aggression against Gaza, gives us hope that one day Israel’s impunity and Western, UN and Arab collusion with it will come to an end, allowing a genuine, just peace to flourish in Palestine and the entire region. Only thus can ethical coexistence have a real chance to be realized.

In his poem, Message to the Living, Henk van Randwijk, a Dutch poet of resistance against the Nazis, wrote:

A people giving in to tyrants
will loose more than body and goods
the light will be extinguished

On Saturday, 24 January 2009, two days after the end of Israeli hostilities and despite all the death, devastation and trauma, hundreds of thousands of Gaza’s children almost literally rose from under the rubble that most of Gaza was reduced to and went with enthusiasm to their damaged schools, carrying their torn bags, scarred books and injured souls. Their agony was deep and anger deeper; but their eyes were still shining with defiance, ambition and hope for emancipation. Do not extinguish their light.- Omar Barghouti is an independent Palestinian political and cultural analyst and a founding member of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign. (This article is based on a presentation he recently gave at Canadian universities as part of Israeli Apartheid Week).

References:

[1] http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10089.shtml

[2] Robert Kagan, “Power and Weakness,” Policy Review, No. 113, June 2002.
[3] The Palestinian BDS Campaign has consistently rejected all forms of racism, including Islamophobia, Zionism and anti-Semitism. www.BDSmovement.net
[4] http://www.kibush.co.il/show_file.asp?num=22676

[5] http://www.transnational.org/Area_MiddleEast/2007/Falk_PalestineGenocide.html

[6] Ibid.
[7] CIDSE Seminar Report, The EU’s Aid to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Brussels, 7 November 2008.
[8] For more on this see: Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oneworld, Oxford, 2007.
[9] http://www.countercurrents.org/audeh210108.htm

[10] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jan/23/israelandthepalestinians.world

[11] http://www.counterpunch.org/aloni03072003.html

[12] http://www.pchrgaza.org/files/W_report/English/2008/22-01-2009.htm

[13] http://right2edu.birzeit.edu/news/article706

[14] http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/news/ambulance-20090128

[15] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/world/middleeast/09redcross.html?_r=1&em

[16] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/letters/article5488380.ece

[17] http://www.amnesty.org/en/appeals-for-action/time-accountability-gaza-and-southern-israel

[18] http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/01/27/israelgaza-international-investigation-essential

[19] http://www.btselem.org/English/Gaza_Strip/20090112_Use_of_White_Phosphorus.asp

[20] http://www.euromedrights.net/pages/560/news/focus/68859

[21] http://jta.org/news/article/2009/01/16/1002308/mp-kaufman-likens-israelis-to-nazis

[22] http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/20316

[23] http://alanhartdiary.blogspot.com/2009/01/new-nazis.html

[24] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/10/letters-gaza-uk

[25] http://www.ijsn.net/home/

[26] http://www.bdsmovement.net/?q=node/52

[27] For more details on this, refer to: Omar Barghouti, On Refugees, Creativity & Ethics, ZNet, September 28, 2002.
[28] I first cited some of the following examples in: http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?

id=124

[29] Ha’aretz Editorial, A Fence Along the Settlers’ Lines, October 3, 2003.
[30] Mazal Mualem, Old Habitats Die Hard, Ha’aretz June 20, 2003.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Dr. Aghlab Khouri of St. John Eye Hospital in Jerusalem explains in his affidavit to a human rights organization the effect of the impact of a rubber coated metal bullet to the eye: “The cases that I [have] treated during the clashes were cases of direct shots to the eyes with rubber coated metal bullets. This kind of bullet does not have a sharp end but has a piece of metal inside; they hit the eye with great speed, creating an impact that shatters the eye.”
[33] Tanya Reinhart, Don’t Say You Didn’t Know, Indymedia, November 6, 2000.
[34] Physicians for Human Rights, Evaluation of the Use of Force in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, November 3, 2000. http://www.phrusa.org/research/forensics/israel/Israel_force_2.html

[35] Chris Hedges, A Gaza Diary, Harper’s Magazine, October 2001.
[36] http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=136433

[37] http://www.anc.org.za/un/uncrime.htm

[38] http://bdsmovement.net/files/English-BNC_Position_Paper-Durban_Review.pdf
[39] Aron Shai, “The Fate of Abandoned Arab Villages in Israel, 1965 -1969” in: History and Memory, Vol. 18, issue #2 (Fall 2006), University of Indiana Press. See also: Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: the Buried History of the Holy Land, Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2000; Walid Khalidi, “Why Did the Palestinians Leave, Revisited.” Journal of Palestine Studies, 134:2 (1995); Slaman Abu Sitta, Atlas of Palestine 1948, Palestnie Land Society, December 2004; Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleaning of Palestine.

[40] In the official Israeli translation, this 1952 Law is wrongly entitled “Law of Nationality.”
[41] Roselle Tekiner, “Race and the Issue of National Identity in Israel.”
[42] E/C.12/1/Add.27 of 4 December 1998.
[43] http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2007/855/re92.htm

[44] Ha’aretz, May 22, 2003.
[45] Ronnie Kasrils and Victoria Brittain, Both Palestinians and Israelis will benefit from a boycott, The Guardian, 25 May 2005. http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2005/may/25/highereducation.uk1

[46] Eli Ashkenazi, Budget for Cancer Mapping doesn’t extend to Arab Sector, Ha’aretz, March 28, 2005.
[47] Lily Galili, A Jewish demographic state, Ha’aretz, Monday, July 01, 2002.

[48] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/sep/21/israelandthepalestinians.bookextracts

[49] http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull&cid=1226404827209

[50] http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=954

[51] http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=971

[52] http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=916

[53] http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=930

[54] http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=959

[55] http://www.pacbi.org/boycott_news_more.php?id=926_0_1_0_C

http://uprootedpalestinians.blogspot.com/2009/03/our-south-africa-moment-has-arrived.html

Tags: africa, arrived, has, moment, our, south

By Omar Barghouti

Introduction

As Israel shifts steadily to the fanatic, racist right, as the latest parliamentary election results have shown, Palestinians under its control are increasingly being brutalized by its escalating colonial and apartheid policies, designed to push them out of their homeland to make a self-fulfilling prophecy out of the old Zionist canard of “a land without a people.” In parallel, international civil society, according to numerous indicators, is reaching a turning point in its view of Israel as a pariah state acting above the law of nations and in its effective action, accordingly, to penalize and ostracize it as it did to apartheid South Africa.

Palestinian communities in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Hebron, the Jordan Valley and the Naqab (Negev), among others, have been recently subjected to some of the worst, ongoing Israeli campaigns of gradual ethnic cleansing intended to “Judaize” their space. Qalqilya is suffocated by the colonial apartheid Wall that surrounds it from all sides, while Nablus is under constant siege. A few months ago, the Palestinian community in Acre was brutally attacked by Jewish-Israeli fundamentalists and xenophobes in one of the worst pogroms witnessed by Palestinians inside Israel. Still, Gaza today stands out as the test of our common humanity and our indispensable morality. A thorough analysis of the role played by Western and some Arab governments in regards to Israel’s criminal war of aggression against Gaza will demonstrate a resounding failure on both accounts. Throughout the atrocious assault, the official West, along with the governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority and the UN leadership,[1] were willing accomplices in Israel’s grave violations of international law and basic human rights.

In words that can quite accurately be used to describe Israel, Robert Kagan, a leading neo-conservative ideologue, justifies hegemonic tendencies as a prerogative of the mightiest [2]:

“The United States remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might.”

True to this paradigm, Israel has for decades maintained a regime of occupation, colonization and apartheid over the indigenous people of Palestine through the “possession and use of military might,” in addition to the indispensable collusion of Western powers, whose unconditional largesse has for six decades enabled Israel to maintain and develop its multi-faceted system of colonial oppression against the Palestinian people.

By contributing to Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza and its criminal war against it, the EU and other Western states have reached a qualitatively different stage of complicity, becoming, more blatantly than ever, full partners in the US-Israeli policy of undermining the rule of law and espousing in its stead the law of the jungle, thereby promoting the Bush-Bin Laden self-fulfilling prophecy of a dichotomous world divided surgically into good and evil, with each side regarding the other as evil.

In response to this fatal alliance of savage capitalism in the West with Israeli racism, exclusion and colonial subjugation, the global movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions, BDS, against Israel presents not only a progressive, anti racist [3], sophisticated, sustainable, moral and effective form of civil, non-violent resistance, but a real chance of becoming the political catalyst and moral anchor for a strengthened, reinvigorated international social movement capable of reaffirming the rights of all humans to freedom, equality and dignity and the right of nations to self determination.

Gaza: the West’s Complicity in War Crimes

As early as 2007, Richard Falk, a prominent international law expert at Princeton University and the current UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT), called the Western-supported Israeli siege of Gaza “a prelude to genocide”[4] and, later, “a Holocaust in the making.”[5] Falk, who happens to be Jewish, argued that the siege is especially disturbing because it vividly expresses “a deliberate intention on the part of Israel and its allies to subject an entire human community to life-endangering conditions of utmost cruelty.”[6]

Using more diplomatic language, Sara Roy [7], a Harvard University expert on development in the OPT, accuses the EU, along with the US, of complicity in a deliberate Israeli policy of “de-development” of the OPT, killing any possibility of creating an independent and sovereign Palestinian state. By providing the Palestinians with “tangible benefits such as higher income and improved infrastructure,” Roy argues, the EU was hoping to buy Palestinian support for substantial concessions in the so-called “peace negotiations.” She concludes, “The logic of international law was abandoned in the interest of maintaining a failed political process.”

An examination of the Israeli siege of Gaza, most of whose population are refugees forcibly displaced [8] by Zionists — and later Israel — during the 1948 Nakba, can elucidate this “de-development” policy which amounts to collective punishment, as most legal experts agree. During this ongoing — now 21-month-old — siege, more than 80% of the 1.5 million Palestinians caged into the world’s “largest open-air prison” have been pushed into poverty and dependency on international humanitarian assistance; the entire economic infrastructure has been systematically decimated, with more than 95% of the factories forced to shut down, driving poverty and unemployment below sub-Saharan African standards; educational institutions have been unable to function properly due to lack of fuel and electricity for prolonged periods; the health care system is on the verge of collapse, and hundreds of patients in need of critical health care, particularly cancer and kidney patients, have died after being denied access to medical facilities outside Gaza.

The longer term effects of the siege are even more daunting.[9] According to the World Health Organization chronic malnutrition and dietary-related diseases have alarmingly increased, resulting in rampant low birth weights; anemia in more than two thirds of all children age one year and younger; and stunted growth in close to 13.2% of children under age five. Moreover, preventable diseases, caused by polluted water and inadequate sewage processing, started spreading wildly. Thousands, mainly children, have suffered serious hearing problems due to Israel’s once concentrated use of sonic booms for weeks on end. A whole generation of Palestinian children in Gaza will suffer severe developmental and psychological disorders for many years to come, health studies have shown. There is also a significant increase already in the rate of incidence of cancer and other deadly diseases directly related to Israeli-inflicted pollution and health care denial.

Reacting to the devastating impact of Israel’s siege, Karen Abu Zayd, the Commissioner-General of UNRWA, warned [10]:

“Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution with the knowledge, acquiescence and — some would say — encouragement of the international community. …Humanitarian and human development work was never meant to function in an environment devoid of constructive efforts to resolve conflict or to address its underlying causes. Indeed, humanitarian work is profoundly undermined in a context where there is implicit or active complicity in creating conditions of mass suffering.”

It is this aspect of the siege, the processes leading to the slow death of masses of people and to inhibiting the development of a generation of Palestinian children that prompted Falk’s eye-opening description of Israel’s siege as constituting acts of genocide.

Former Israeli education minister and leftist leader, Shulamit Aloni, adopted years ago this designation of Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians under its occupation. As early as 2003, she condemned an Israeli atrocity that pales in comparison with the Israeli massacres just committed in Gaza saying [11]:

“So it’s not yet genocide of the terrible and unique style of which we were past victims. And as one of the smart [Israeli] Generals told me, we do not have crematoria and gas chambers. Is anything less than that consistent with Jewish ethics? Did he ever hear how an entire people said that it did not know what was done in its name?”

And that was before Israel’s rolling massacre in Gaza.

According to respected human rights organizations active in the field, Israel’s 23-day military offensive, which started on December 27, 2008, led to the death of more than 1,400 Palestinians, approximately 83% of whom are civilians [12], and to the complete or partial destruction of thousands of homes; the leading university; 45 mosques; several ministries, including those of education and justice; scores of schools[13]; a Red Crescent Hospital and tens of ambulances [14] and clinics; as well as thousands of factories and small businesses. Several massacres were committed and well documented. The ICRC [15] accused Israel, in an unusually sharp tone, of failing to provide medical care to the injured and impeding medical relief from reaching them, thereby causing their bleeding to death, both severe violations of international humanitarian law. More than 400 Palestinian children were killed by the three-week long Israeli bombing, many due to burns caused by Israel’s illegal use of phosphorous bombs.

On the opening day of its assault on Gaza, the Israeli military caused massive destruction of civilian infrastructure and massacred close to 200 Palestinian civilians, many of whom were non-combatant police trainees, while no Israeli civilians were reportedly killed. Nevertheless, Western leaders were quick to issue statements expressing concern about the loss of life and suffering on “both sides,” blaming the Palestinian resistance for provoking the atrocities, and absolving Israel of any responsibility under the pretext of its “right to defend itself.”

Leading international jurists [16], however, categorically rejected Israel’s self-defense argument, accusing it of committing war crimes. The UN Human Rights Council and the UN Secretary General have called for impartial, independent war crimes investigations. Amnesty International [17], Human Rights Watch [18], the main Israeli human rights organization, B’Tselem [19], the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network[20], among many others, have similarly accused Israel of committing war crimes, completely refuting its self-defense claim, particularly since it was Israel that first violated the June 2008 ceasefire with Hamas on November 4th, when it attacked and killed 6 resistance fighters without any provocation.

Gerald Kaufman, a senior Jewish Labor Party member of the British Parliament compared some Israeli actions to those of Nazis. [21] So did Noam Chomsky [22] and Holocaust survivor and senior academic, Hajo Meyer [23], of A Different Jewish Voice in the Netherlands. Echoing Kaufman, Chomsky and Meyer, prominent Jewish British intellectuals and academics compared Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto in a letter to the Guardian [24], as did the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network on this year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. [25]

Israel’s Other Colonial and Apartheid Policies

Gaza aside, Palestinian civil society and a growing number of influential human rights advocates recognize that Israel’s regime over the indigenous people of Palestine constitutes occupation, colonization and apartheid. Specifically, Israel’s decades-old oppression takes three basic forms which were at the core of the Palestinian BDS Call [26]:

(1) The prolonged occupation and colonization of Gaza and the West Bank, including east Jerusalem, and other Arab territories;
(2) The system of racial discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel; and
(3) The persistent denial of the UN-sanctioned rights of the Palestinian refugees, paramount among which is their right to reparations and to return to their homes of origin, in accordance with UNGA Res. 194.

Ending these three forms of oppression is the minimal requirement to achieve a just peace in our region.

The most important of all three injustices is without doubt Israel’s denial of the right of Palestinian refugees to return. The core of the question of Palestine has always been the plight of the refugees who were ethnically cleansed during the Nakba and ever since. The fact that refugees form a majority of the Palestinian people coupled with their 60-year old suffering in exile make the recognition of their basic rights, including their right to reparations and return to their homes of origin, the litmus test of morality for anyone suggesting a just and enduring solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Moral and legal rights aside, the denial of Palestinian refugee rights guarantees the perpetuation of conflict. [27]

As to the occupation [28], nothing quite captures its immense injustice as much as Israel’s colonial Wall. Despite the Wall’s grave repercussions on Palestinian livelihood, environment, and political rights, a near total consensus [29] exists amongst Israeli Jews in its support. The former Israeli environment minister, Yehudit Naot, however, protested a specific aspect of the Wall, saying [30]:

“The separation fence severs the continuity of open areas and is harmful to the landscape, the flora and fauna, the ecological corridors and the drainage of the creeks. The protective system will irreversibly affect the land resource and create enclaves of communities that are cut off from their surroundings.”

Even after irises were moved and passages for small animals were created, the spokesperson for the Israel Nature and National Parks Protection Authority still complained [31]:

“The animals don’t know that there is now a border. They are used to a certain living space, and what we are concerned about is that their genetic diversity will be affected because different population groups will not be able to mate and reproduce. Isolating the populations on two sides of a fence definitely creates a genetic problem.”

While so attuned to the welfare of wild flowers and rabbits, Israel treated Palestinian children as dispensable creatures. Professionally-trained sharpshooters fatally targeted them in minor stone-throwing incidences. For example, medical sources [32] and human rights organizations, including Physicians for Human Rights, have documented in the first stage of the current Palestinian intifada a pattern of targeting the eyes [33] and knees of Palestinian children with a “clear intention” to harm. [34]

And when there was no stone-throwing incident to hide behind, Israeli soldiers had to provoke one. The veteran American journalist Chris Hedges exposed [35] how Israeli troops before their redeployment out of Gaza had methodically provoked Palestinian children playing in the dunes of the Rafah area in order to shoot them, concluding: “Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered […] but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.”

Israel’s repressive and racist policies in the 1967-occupied Palestinian territory have been recognized as constituting apartheid by a host of opinion leaders such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former US president, Jimmy Carter, and former UN Special Rapporteur for human rights, Prof. John Dugard, among others. In the same vein, former Israeli Attorney General, Michael Ben-Yair, wrote in a 2002 article in Ha’aretz describing Israel’s regime in the OPT, “We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities. … In effect, we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories….” [36]

However, the applicability of the crime of apartheid as defined in UN conventions to Israel itself has, for the most part, been either inadvertently glossed over or intentionally ignored as an explosive subject that has every potential to invite the vengeful wrath of powerful pro-Israel lobbies. Regardless, one cannot but examine the facts and analyze Israel’s system of governance accordingly.

The strongest argument given by — sometimes well-meaning — experts who dismiss the apartheid label for Israel is that the analogy between Israel and South Africa is not exact and, in many respects, Israel’s oppression is even more severe, demanding a different designation altogether. The problem with this argument is that it assumes, quite incorrectly, that apartheid is a South African trademark and, therefore, that every regime accused of practicing apartheid must be shown to be identical to South Africa’s apartheid regime of yesteryear. Apartheid, however, although brought to world attention and given its name by the racist regime in South Africa, has been recognized by the UN for decades as a generalized crime with a universal definition.

The Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid of 1976 defines apartheid [37] as “similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practised in southern Africa” which have “the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them, in particular by means such as segregation, expropriation of land, and denial of the right to leave and return to their country, the right to a nationality and the right to freedom of movement and residence” (Article II). The similarity to South Africa is cited not as a condition but in recognition of its status as a historic precedent.

As a recent in-depth strategic position paper [38] published by the Palestinian BDS National Committee states, Israel’s origins, laws and policies against the Palestinian people fit to a large extent the definition of apartheid. The conceptual origins of Israel’s unique form of apartheid are found in Zionism, a racist European ideology that was adopted by the dominant stream of the Zionist movement (World Zionist Organization, Jewish Agency, Jewish National Fund, among others) in order to justify and recruit political support for its colonial project of establishing an exclusive Jewish state in historic Palestine. Political Zionists dismissed the indigenous population of Palestine as non-existent in the famous Zionist slogan of “a land without a people;” making this a self-fulfilling prophecy, Zionist forces forcibly displaced 750,000-900,000 Palestinians from their homeland and destroyed hundreds of the depopulated Palestinian villages in an operation termed “cleaning the landscape” that lasted until 1960. [39]

Israel’s regime over the Palestinian people amounts to apartheid precisely because it displays many of the main features of the crime as defined by international law:

1. Racial discrimination against the indigenous Palestinian people who became citizens of the State of Israel was formalized and institutionalized through the creation by law of a “Jewish nationality”, which is distinct from Israeli citizenship. No “Israeli” nationality exists in Israel, and the Supreme Court has persistently refused to recognize one as it would end the system of Jewish supremacy in Israel. The 1950 Law of Return entitles all Jews — and only Jews — to the rights of nationals, namely the right to enter “Eretz Yisrael” (Israel and the OPT) and immediately enjoy full legal and political rights. “Jewish nationality” under the Law of Return is extraterritorial in contravention of international public law norms pertaining to nationality. It includes Jewish citizens of other countries, irrespective of whether they wish to be part of the collective of “Jewish nationals,” and excludes “non-Jews” (i.e., Palestinians) from nationality rights in Israel.

2. The 1952 Citizenship Law [40] has created a discriminatory two-tier legal system whereby Jews hold nationality and citizenship, while the remaining indigenous Palestinian citizens hold only citizenship. [41] Under Israeli law the status of Jewish nationality is accompanied with first-class rights and benefits which are not granted to Palestinian citizens.

3. The Israeli Status Law of 1952 authorizes the World Zionist Organization/Jewish Agency and its subsidiaries, including the Jewish National Fund, to control most of the land in Israel, for the exclusive benefit of Jews. In 1998, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, CESCR, expressed [42] grave concern about this law and stated that large-scale and systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and property by the State and the transfer of that property to these agencies constitute an institutionalized form of discrimination, because these agencies by definition would deny the use of these properties to non-Jewish citizens of the State.

4. Return of Palestinian refugees and Internally-Displaced Persons (IDPs), as required by international law, has been prevented by means of force and legislation on racist grounds. Simply because they are not Jews, Palestinian refugees were excluded from entitlement to citizenship in the State of Israel under the 1952 Citizenship Law. They were “denationalized” and turned into stateless refugees in violation of the law of state succession. Their land and other property were confiscated by the State. The approximately 150,000 Palestinians who remained in Israel after the 1948 Nakba were placed under a military regime (1948 – 1966) similar to the regime currently in place in the OPT.

For decades, racial discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel in every vital aspect of life has been the norm. From land ownership to education to health to jobs to housing, the indigenous Palestinians have been denied equality by the State’s laws and policies. For instance, they are not allowed, to buy or rent land in about 93% of the state lands of Israel. [43] To this date, polls consistently show overwhelming majorities of Israeli Jews standing in opposition to full equality with the indigenous Palestinians in the state. [44] So the fact those Palestinians can vote, unlike their black African counterpart under South African apartheid, becomes almost a formality, a tokenism of sorts, clearly designed to project a deceptive image of democracy and fend off well-justified accusations of apartheid. [45]

Even in cancer research [46], Israeli apartheid is strongly present. In June 2001, the Health Ministry published a map of the geographical distribution of malignant diseases in Israel during the years 1984-1999. The report did not include a single Palestinian community in Israel, with the exception of Rahat, ostensibly due to “budgetary problems.” This research is particularly important because, in Israel, only when a correlation is shown between the presence of polluting sites and the incidence of malignant disease is it possible to prevent installation of new hazards, or demand tighter environmental standards. By intentionally omitting Palestinian towns in its extensive cancer mapping, the Health Ministry has indirectly given a green light to polluters to relocate to Palestinian towns inside Israel — not to mention in the OPT. The results of such health apartheid are ominous. In the past three decades the rate of malignant diseases in the Palestinian population in Israel has risen 3 to 4 times higher than among the Jewish population. A spokesperson for the Israeli Center against Racism commented, “The report has produced two different groups. One, an overprivileged group, whose lives are dear to the state and to the Health Ministry; a second, whose lives are of no importance to the state.”

This discrimination must be seen in the wider context of Israel’s perception of Palestinians by leading Israeli politicians, intellectuals, academics and mass media outlets as a “demographic threat” that needs to be dealt with resolutely; thus the rise of openly fascist parties in the recent parliamentary elections. Echoing a popular view in Israel, a ranking academic, Major General (reserve) Shlomo Gazit from the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, preaches: “Democracy has to be subordinated to demography.”[47] And now, the fanatic right Israeli leader, Avigdor Lieberman, and his supporters are saying democracy has to be subordinated to loyalty to Jewish supremacy.

The complicity of Western governments in all this horrific violation of international law and basic human rights has led many analysts to view the role of the West as profoundly flawed, both morally and legally. The comprehensive impunity enjoyed by Israel has allowed it to project itself and to act as an uncontrollable “mad dog” — an image advocated by Moshe Dayan decades ago and endorsed most recently by Israeli military historian, Martin Van Creveld [48] — in an attempt to make the Palestinians submit to its colonial will, to accept slavery as fate.

This criminal impunity and categorical denial of rights, more than anything else, were the main motivation behind the Palestinian BDS campaign.

Since 9 July 2005, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions have been advocated by virtually the entire Palestinian civil society everywhere as an effective form of solidarity that has a real potential to bring about an end to Western complicity with Israel and, therefore, to Israel’s occupation, colonization and apartheid. During and ever since Israel’s criminal war on Gaza, Palestinian civil society has stood more united than ever in urging people of conscience all over the world to hold Israel accountable for its crimes by treating it as South Africa was under apartheid rule. In response, unions, academic groups, faith-based organizations, political parties, social movements and others have adopted creative, context-sensitive and sustainable BDS campaigns, from South Africa to Norway, from Australia to Canada, from Britain to Venezuela, and even from the podium of the President of the UN General Assembly. [49]

Israel’s state terrorism in Gaza, enabled by virtually unlimited support from the US and Western governments in general, was a key catalyst in spreading and deepening BDS around the world, prompting advocates of Palestinian rights to feel that our South Africa moment has finally arrived. Israel is now widely perceived, at a grassroots level, as an international pariah that commits war crimes with impunity and that needs to be held accountable to international law and basic principles of human rights.

The last few weeks alone witnessed some of the most significant indicators to date of this phenomenon. The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Ontario’s University Workers Coordinating Committee (OUWCC) at its annual conference last February endorsed [50] a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. A few days ago, the Fédération autonome du collégial (FAC), Quebec College Federation, also joined the BDS campaign. [51] In Durban, South Africa, the COSATU-affiliated dock workers union refused in early February to offload an Israeli cargo ship, [52] reminding us of similar sanctions taken against South African ships during the apartheid era. An Australian dock workers union and a group of American progressive union leaders endorsed the South African BDS action. In the US, Hampshire College set a historic precedent [53] by announcing its divestment from six companies profiting from the Israeli occupation. Significantly, Hampshire was also the first college in the US to divest from apartheid South Africa in the 1970s. In Wales, Cardiff University acceded [54] to demands by students and decided to divest from companies supporting the occupation. Even in France, where BDS had faced an uphill struggle for several years, a statement [55] was lately issued by leading academics explicitly endorsing BDS to end Israel’s impunity.

The latest spectacular entrenchment of the BDS campaign, especially since the Israeli aggression against Gaza, gives us hope that one day Israel’s impunity and Western, UN and Arab collusion with it will come to an end, allowing a genuine, just peace to flourish in Palestine and the entire region. Only thus can ethical coexistence have a real chance to be realized.

In his poem, Message to the Living, Henk van Randwijk, a Dutch poet of resistance against the Nazis, wrote:

A people giving in to tyrants
will loose more than body and goods
the light will be extinguished

On Saturday, 24 January 2009, two days after the end of Israeli hostilities and despite all the death, devastation and trauma, hundreds of thousands of Gaza’s children almost literally rose from under the rubble that most of Gaza was reduced to and went with enthusiasm to their damaged schools, carrying their torn bags, scarred books and injured souls. Their agony was deep and anger deeper; but their eyes were still shining with defiance, ambition and hope for emancipation. Do not extinguish their light.- Omar Barghouti is an independent Palestinian political and cultural analyst and a founding member of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign. (This article is based on a presentation he recently gave at Canadian universities as part of Israeli Apartheid Week).

References:

[1] http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10089.shtml

[2] Robert Kagan, “Power and Weakness,” Policy Review, No. 113, June 2002.
[3] The Palestinian BDS Campaign has consistently rejected all forms of racism, including Islamophobia, Zionism and anti-Semitism. www.BDSmovement.net
[4] http://www.kibush.co.il/show_file.asp?num=22676

[5] http://www.transnational.org/Area_MiddleEast/2007/Falk_PalestineGenocide.html

[6] Ibid.
[7] CIDSE Seminar Report, The EU’s Aid to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Brussels, 7 November 2008.
[8] For more on this see: Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oneworld, Oxford, 2007.
[9] http://www.countercurrents.org/audeh210108.htm

[10] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jan/23/israelandthepalestinians.world

[11] http://www.counterpunch.org/aloni03072003.html

[12] http://www.pchrgaza.org/files/W_report/English/2008/22-01-2009.htm

[13] http://right2edu.birzeit.edu/news/article706

[14] http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/news/ambulance-20090128

[15] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/world/middleeast/09redcross.html?_r=1&em

[16] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/letters/article5488380.ece

[17] http://www.amnesty.org/en/appeals-for-action/time-accountability-gaza-and-southern-israel

[18] http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/01/27/israelgaza-international-investigation-essential

[19] http://www.btselem.org/English/Gaza_Strip/20090112_Use_of_White_Phosphorus.asp

[20] http://www.euromedrights.net/pages/560/news/focus/68859

[21] http://jta.org/news/article/2009/01/16/1002308/mp-kaufman-likens-israelis-to-nazis

[22] http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/20316

[23] http://alanhartdiary.blogspot.com/2009/01/new-nazis.html

[24] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/10/letters-gaza-uk

[25] http://www.ijsn.net/home/

[26] http://www.bdsmovement.net/?q=node/52

[27] For more details on this, refer to: Omar Barghouti, On Refugees, Creativity & Ethics, ZNet, September 28, 2002.
[28] I first cited some of the following examples in: http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?

id=124

[29] Ha’aretz Editorial, A Fence Along the Settlers’ Lines, October 3, 2003.
[30] Mazal Mualem, Old Habitats Die Hard, Ha’aretz June 20, 2003.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Dr. Aghlab Khouri of St. John Eye Hospital in Jerusalem explains in his affidavit to a human rights organization the effect of the impact of a rubber coated metal bullet to the eye: “The cases that I [have] treated during the clashes were cases of direct shots to the eyes with rubber coated metal bullets. This kind of bullet does not have a sharp end but has a piece of metal inside; they hit the eye with great speed, creating an impact that shatters the eye.”
[33] Tanya Reinhart, Don’t Say You Didn’t Know, Indymedia, November 6, 2000.
[34] Physicians for Human Rights, Evaluation of the Use of Force in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, November 3, 2000. http://www.phrusa.org/research/forensics/israel/Israel_force_2.html

[35] Chris Hedges, A Gaza Diary, Harper’s Magazine, October 2001.
[36] http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=136433

[37] http://www.anc.org.za/un/uncrime.htm

[38] http://bdsmovement.net/files/English-BNC_Position_Paper-Durban_Review.pdf
[39] Aron Shai, “The Fate of Abandoned Arab Villages in Israel, 1965 -1969” in: History and Memory, Vol. 18, issue #2 (Fall 2006), University of Indiana Press. See also: Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: the Buried History of the Holy Land, Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2000; Walid Khalidi, “Why Did the Palestinians Leave, Revisited.” Journal of Palestine Studies, 134:2 (1995); Slaman Abu Sitta, Atlas of Palestine 1948, Palestnie Land Society, December 2004; Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleaning of Palestine.

[40] In the official Israeli translation, this 1952 Law is wrongly entitled “Law of Nationality.”
[41] Roselle Tekiner, “Race and the Issue of National Identity in Israel.”
[42] E/C.12/1/Add.27 of 4 December 1998.
[43] http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2007/855/re92.htm

[44] Ha’aretz, May 22, 2003.
[45] Ronnie Kasrils and Victoria Brittain, Both Palestinians and Israelis will benefit from a boycott, The Guardian, 25 May 2005. http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2005/may/25/highereducation.uk1

[46] Eli Ashkenazi, Budget for Cancer Mapping doesn’t extend to Arab Sector, Ha’aretz, March 28, 2005.
[47] Lily Galili, A Jewish demographic state, Ha’aretz, Monday, July 01, 2002.

[48] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/sep/21/israelandthepalestinians.bookextracts

[49] http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull&cid=1226404827209

[50] http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=954

[51] http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=971

[52] http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=916

[53] http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=930

[54] http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=959

[55] http://www.pacbi.org/boycott_news_more.php?id=926_0_1_0_C

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