Israel: ethnic cleansing 24/7

Israel was founded with the idea that the land it would occupy would be for Jews alone and the land that it did not yet occupy, but wanted, would also be for Jews alone. This is why Israel has never defined its borders. The project of Zionism is and always has been to throw undesirables (non-Jews) out.

The eviction theme is being played out today most prominently in the ever expanding settlements in occupied territory taken in the 1967 war, but variations take place in Israel itself, the most prominent being the concentration, eviction and harassment of the Arab residents of East Jerusalem. Even further below the radar is the terrible treatment of the Arab residents of the Negev Desert, where one Arab community's meager infrastructure at Al Araqib has been demolished by Israeli bulldozers literally dozens of times.

In the Negev Desert more generally, the Israeli government seeks to sweep approximately 40,000 Arab Bedouin, who are Israeli citizens (although second class because not Jewish) into concentrated housing, leaving the area where they have lived since before the founding of the state free to be used by Jewish Israelis as they see fit. The infamous Jewish National Fund (JNF) practice of "re-forestation" is as usual involved. This attempt to make it appear nothing was present before the JNF arrived to plant trees is most famously exhibited at Canada Park, American Independence Park and other such "parks" where Palestinian towns used to sit. Note the clever naming to make Western outsiders feel involved and also to project an environmental improvement theme. This laundering of odious projects is an Israeli specialty.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) has produced detailed information on how this Bedouin removal proposal, called the Begin Plan (named after noted Israeli practitioner of terror in his youth and Israeli Prime Minister in later years, Menachem Begin) would operate. The plan says in the introduction

"The
 development
 of
 the 
Negev is
 one
 of
 the 
most
 important
 national
 tasks
 in
 the

coming 
decade
 and 
the 
government 
has 
decided to 
advance it 
in various 
ways."

Development means, of course, more Jewish settlements, which Israeli always considers an advance. Increasing the Jewish population of the Galilee to the north is also a national project. Any American should recognize this kind of only-one-people-allowed idea as antithetical to liberty and justice for all, but at the same time it is fundamental to Israel as an exclusive Jewish state. You won't hear about any of this from Washington.

ACRI makes these points among many others:

• Around half of the Arab population in the Negev – some 90,000 people – live in 46 Bedouin towns and villages. This accounts for just five percent of the entire land of the Negev region. Israel does not recognize 35 of these villages.

• ...the Begin Plan is...based on an erroneous assumption that views the Bedouin as “squatters,” ignoring the fact that most of the villages have been in existence in their current location since before the establishment of the State of Israel. Other villages were established by coercive transfer during the period of martial law. Like its precursor, the current plan also seeks to restrict the Bedouin to a specific area and to forcibly apply this policy.

• While seeking to demolish dozens of villages and displace thousands of people, the Government is simultaneously promoting the establishment of new Jewish communities, some of which are due to be built on the ruins of Bedouin villages.

• The bill fails to take into account the circumstances of each specific unrecognized village and instead treats all of the villages as a single entity, without examining the relevant facts in each specific instance.

 

Yes, it's outrageous, but yet another blatant ethnic-cleansing operation for a nation designed to wrest a land away from the indigenous people, a project that has run remarkably smoothly for the last 65 years and that continues with plenty of American money flowing in from a Congress eager to send even more. I hope you will read ACRI's full account. You are supporting this in full if you are an American with over $3 billion going to Israel from the United States government every year and a promise from Obama for more to come.

Israel has modified the Golden Rule to read: When you get the chance to do unto others as wrongly as has been done unto you, do it with a will!

 

Israel - born in confiscations

Adalah, "The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel", states that only 3 to 3.5% of the land within Israel (not the occupied territories taken in 1967) is owned by Arabs today, whereas in 1948, 48% of the same land was held by Arabs. Adalah has come out with an interactive map showing how land was appropriated by Israel in the early years of that state; two Israeli laws making it possible.

The Absentees' Property Law of 1950 confiscated all the land owned, possessed or used by the Arab refugees.

The Land Acquisition Law of 1953 confiscated 1.2 to 1.3 million dunams (a dunam is 1/4 acre) taken from 349 towns and villages.

The interactive map breaks down the area into districts which, when clicked, will expand to show the towns and villages affected. Take a look.

"The Story of Israel", which I put in quotes to indicate it is propaganda that Israel wishes the world to believe and which most Americans have swallowed whole, would have us think that the land was largely empty and undeveloped, waiting for Zionists to take up residence and ownership to the detriment of no one. The actual history tells us that the land was taken by any and all means and is still being taken from the indigenous people who live on it. Whether it is Israel "proper" or "within the Green Line" or in the "Occupied Territories" the process is essentially the same - theft - the only difference being when it was done and the specific tactics used to achieve it.

One vividly documented example is available at my posting on Canada Park. I strongly urge you to view the 1991 Canadian Broadcasting Company video there or directly on Google Video.

hasbara incoming

I received an email from a friend with "What if Jews had followed the Palestinian Path" attached, an opinion piece from the Wall Street Journal that self-righteously lauds the up-from-the-bottom course of European Jewry after WWII in contrast to the Palestinians living on the dole in camps at UN expense. I held back my inclination to gag and responded with the following...

Have you watched Canada Park, the CBC production? No. You don't deal with the present reality and aren't interested in it. You prefer to dwell on events of the middle 20th century than the current eviction process of El Arakib in the Negev where Bedouin who are actually Israeli citizens have been continually thrown off their land to make room for yet another "re-forestry" project of the Jewish National Fund. There are many videos of this - a current event - but you aren't interested, it's just more Arabs making a fuss.

This article you sent is yet another self-congratulatory piece of hasbara that sentimentally dwells on history instead of looking at the current situation in which Israel is coming to resemble the states that expelled the Jews in the past.

The holocaust was a terrible thing. So was and is Zionism - a deliberate plan to evict people and replace them. Both are human rights catastrophes, only the latter continues right now and the United States (alone) with your full approval makes it possible.

No matter how many times I tell you, you don't get the fact that a free people, American Jews, who live in complete safety and with full legal protections - can, at this very moment, decide they want to be Israeli without giving up their American citizenship, move to Palestine and within a month be stealing land from the indigenous people. This is both history and current events. Armed settlers, many of them with dual American citizenship burn Palestinian olive trees and take their property on almost any given day.

Golda Meir, pictured in your article, famously said "there are no Palestinians". She was a Russian. She talked a lot about the "Third Kingdom of Israel" not seeing the people who have been there all along. Avigdor Lieberman, the current foreign minister of Israel is also a Russian and he, too, wants Arabs out of their own land.

Any Israeli can become a citizen of the U.S. without prejudice to their nationality if they apply to do so, but Israel absolutely refuses to allow Palestinians to become citizens of Israel. Those Arabs who are citizens are encouraged to leave. Their representation in the Knesset is strictly limited. Yet, as Moshe Dayan said, every inch of what is Israel was once Palestinian land. Instead of dwelling on the Holocaust that took place in Europe, check out old still photos and movies of Palestine, definitely not an empty land waiting for Europeans to take it.

Most amazing to me about your position is you live in a country that allows everyone to be a citizen, yet you fully support a country that is for one group only. You are content to see others suffer denial of residency and rights that you would never accept for yourself, nor, I hope, would you accept for any group of people in the United States.

Google three words "Canada Park CBC" it's a Canadian Broadcasting Corp. production. You won't do it.

Lifta - Israel wants to erase it, too

In Israel's war of independence, over 400 Palestinian towns were taken, most have been destroyed since as is the case with the three that are mentioned in my posting about Canada Park.

Lifta is a former Palestinian town near Jerusalem that still has many buildings intact. Palestinians are not to go there. The British newspaper The Guardian has published a sympathetic account with an excellent video.

Of the history of Lifta, The Guardian says (italics mine) -

The remains of the village are bounded by roads, along which traffic rumbles to and from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem's suburbs and settlements. On the ridge above Lifta, concrete mixers and diggers are at work on a high-speed rail link to Tel Aviv; deep in the valley below is a guarded complex, said to be the site of the Israeli government's underground nuclear bunker. Out of sight of Lifta's ruins, but built on its former farmlands are the Knesset (Israel's parliament), the supreme court, the Hadassah hospital, the Hebrew University and the city's central bus station.

In 1948, the village owned 1,200 hectares but they have long gone, along with olive, fig, apricot, almond, plum, pomegranate and citrus trees plus the fields of spinach, cauliflower, peas and beans that gave Lifta its prosperity. "Life was rich," recalls Odeh. "The spring watered the village gardens. We had more olives than we needed so we sold them and the oil in Jerusalem."

Now, Israel wants to bulldoze Lifta and replace it with a 212 unit development. The people who lived there are opposed, but of course they have no say.

Canada Park

Within the occupied territories is a park built with money donated to the Jewish National Fund by Canadians called, appropriately enough, Canada Park.

In this compelling 30 minute program produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation twenty years ago (1991) the story of how this clean, modern, attractive place came to be built over three destroyed Palestinian villages, the silent evidence of which remained in 1991, is told.

Be aware that as I write, the Jewish National Fund is attempting to create a forest on the site of the Al Arakib bedouin village in the Negev desert. The Israeli police/IDF have destroyed that village a scarcely believable 2 dozen times (tents are erected and then they are swept away).

UPDATE: January 1, 2012. The following video is an account of the operations of the JNF and Canada Park is mentioned. The video starts with the situation at El Arakib.