Since 1967, Israel has demolished about 10,000 Palestinian homes in the Occupied Territories. In U.S. news reports, house demolitions are usually reported as harsh – if understandable - reprisals taken against the families of suicide bombers (though whatever their motivation, such reprisals are illegal under Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which protects all Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and in all Jerusalem from acts of reprisal by the Occupying Power). However, the mere fact that Israel has demolished 10,000 homes during a conflict in which the Palestinians have carried out 104 suicide bombings tells us that something beyond deterring suicide bombers or punishing their families is going on here.
According to UN figures, cited in Dismantling the Fortresses of Fear by Jeff Halper, former Professor of Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University, less than 600 of the 10,000 houses demolished since the occupation began in 1967 involved security suspects. The rest — 94 percent — were simply houses of ordinary people who were in Israel’s way [emphasis mine]. Halper’s Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) puts it simply: Israel’s policy of house demolitions seeks to confine Palestinians to small enclaves, leaving most of the land free for Israeli settlement.
In other words, this what we would call ethnic cleansing, if it were being carried out by any nation on earth other than Israel, or inflicted upon any people other than the Palestinians. It is the same expulsion of one people from their land by another which provoked NATO bombing campaigns when it was perpetrated in Bosnia and Kosovo, but which is protected by the American veto at the Security Council when it is perpetrated by Israel.
In A prison that keeps getting smaller, Gideon Levy reminded Ha’aretz readers two weeks ago (during the High Holidays, which Israeli Jews celebrate with trips throughout Israel and trips abroad), that living alongside us is a nation in a narrow prison, which is constantly closing in on them, almost to the limits of human endurance. He describes how throughout the Oslo years, which were supposed to see the end of Occupation, Israel systematically shrunk the area in which Palestinian population could live, work and travel:
First, the Gaza Strip was cut off from the West Bank, and East Jerusalem from the rest of the Palestinian territories. Then, with the eruption of the current intifada, Israel added the siege to the closure: in order to get from town to town, a special permit - which was difficult to obtain - was needed, and the living area was made smaller and smaller. The measures utilized were also aggravated and their cruelty intensified: from manned roadblocks - where it was still perhaps possible to rely on the humanity of the soldiers to allow women in labor or dying people to pass - to locked iron gates, earth ramparts, trenches and concrete blocks that make passage totally impossible. These means have now been bolstered by the separation barrier, which severs farmers from their land, students from their schools and workers from their place of employment.
On the subject of the Wall, Amira Hass reported last week, in an article (IDF Redefines Palestinians West of the Fence) that got no press here in the US, that the IDF had quietly changed the status of the first 12,000 Palestinians trapped on the "wrong" side of the Wall, i.e. between the Wall and the Green Line. Instead of being Palestinian residents of "Judea and Samaria", they now belong to a new category of non-citizen, “long-term residents” of the State of Israel.
The defining feature of the category “long-term residents” – apart from the slew of regulations to keep them effectively living in enclosures - is that they may continue their normal lives in their homes and on their land and travel to their daily jobs only if granted a special permit to do so by the Israeli military administration. Without a permit, they may be legally expelled from their own lands. (This new regulation explicitly does not apply to Israeli settlers living between the Wall and the Green Line, or to any Jew worldwide who is legally entitled to immigrate and settle there). Hass finished on a note of foreboding, pointing out that based on the new directives, thousands of Palestinians are essentially illegally residing in their homes and on their land, "between the obstacle and the State of Israel." And Israeli soldiers have full rights to throw them out without delay.
Yesterday, in a follow-up article (Expulsion, little by little), Hass reported that the slow expulsion of these Palestinians from their lands has already begun:
The fears and suspicions, as usual, came true – and very quickly. Hiding behind security rationales and the seemingly neutral bureaucratic language of military orders is the gateway for expulsion. Not massive expulsion, heaven forbid, not on trucks, and not far. Drop by drop, unseen, not so many that it would be noticed internationally and shock public opinion; with the proper measure so the Israelis can continue saying it's justified for security reasons…
In the first two Palestinian villages (Jabara and Ras a Tira) to come under the “Special Permits” regime, 66 people have been denied the permits that would allow them freedom of movement in and out of their villages. They are now faced with the option of giving up their work in neighboring cities, giving up their right to visit family members in the villages on the other side of the fence, etc., or packing up, abandoning their homes and their land, and heading east to the other side of the Wall to live as refugees in the shrinking enclaves where Palestinians are still allowed to live. As Hass points out, this affects more than those first 66, as [a]ll those who did not get a permit have a family: they'll have to decide whether to adjust to the new lifestyle, in which the father is in exile on the other side of the fence, and the family is only allowed to see him with permission from the army, or to leave the land.
Or to leave the land. That is what the Wall comes down to. If this barrier was really intended to defend Israel, it would be on the border between Israel and the Territories, and probably welcomed by Palestinians as much as Israelis. But this Wall (and the siege, and the closures) are actually about completing the depopulation that was begun in 1948, and have nothing to do with defending Israel within its internationally-recognised borders. As Gideon Levy concludes, they are measures that will bring Israel neither peace nor security, for [i]t has long since been shown that the mass imprisonment, far from preventing terrorism, only encourages it. Levy is right: the illegal measures which Israel inflicts on the Palestinian population with our support have consequences for us all. For as much as the U.S. media tries to present suicide bombers as people motivated by “hate for the Jews” or “jealousy of our freedom” the fact is that Palestinian militants do not need abstract hatreds to motivate them, when they have lived for 37 years under an Israeli military regime that discriminates against them and dispossesses them, and which continues only because we, the U.S., provide the financial support and diplomatic cover that make it possible.
Remember Hanadi Jarahat, who blew herself up at Maxim’s restaurant in Haifa on 4 October 2003, killing twenty people? Much has been made of the fact that she may have been motivated by seeing her brother Fadi and cousin Salah, members of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, killed by the IDF on 12 June 2003. Less widely-reported is the fact that Jaharat’s 50-year-old father is suffering from terminal liver cancer. He could have been treated at the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, but he discovered just one week before the Maxim's bombing that, as the father of a dead Jihadi, he had been refused the Israeli permit that would have allowed him out of besieged Jenin to receive potentially life-saving treatment. Is it really so hard to understand that when you tell someone that their desperately-ill father can’t go to Haifa for chemo, but must stay in his enclave and die untreated, they might just turn round and tell you, ‘In that case, I’ll go to Haifa. And I’ll die there. And so will you’ ?
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