July 30, 2012

EDITOR: While the world looks away, Israel prepares the next stage of the Nakba

An excellent thing, the Olympic Games… while the world is more interested in medals and sport nationalism, Israel is working away at the plan to expel tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homes, both in Israel and the West Bank. Zionism was never confused about its aims, only Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian seems to pretend such confusion – the ultimate aim was and is to rid Palestine of all its indigenous inhabitants, It takes time, it takes money, and it takes a lot of work, but that is what they are working on. As in Herzl’s plan – those who can be bought off, will be paid to go, those who insist on staying, will not be able to make a living, and forced to leave. There was no confusion then, and there is not any now. There is only pretense by nice people like Amos Oz, A B Yehoshua and Jonathan Freedland.

And we have not even started talking about nice Mr. Romney, the Mormon on Hormons, who forgot to speak about his co-religionists converting my Nazi-murdered family into proper Mormons after their death… the guy who cannot wait to see Israel attack Iran! What a prospect for the next four years, if this dangerous man wins the race to the White House!

Stop greatest forced displacement of Arab citizens of Israel since the 1950s: JFJFP


In September 2011, the Israeli government approved the Prawer Plan for mass expulsion of the Arab Bedouin community in the Naqab (Negev) desert. If fully implemented this plan will result in the forced displacement of up to 70,000 Arab Bedouin citizens of Israel and the destruction of 35 “unrecognized” villages.
Despite the Arab Bedouin community’s complete rejection of the plan and strong disapproval from the international community and human rights groups, the Prawer Plan is happening now. More than 1,000 homes were demolished in 2011 and in August a special police force is slated to officially begin implementing the plan, and demolish even more. Adalah and our NGO partners have been challenging the Prawer Plan before courts, government authorities and the international community, but we need your help to stop what would be the largest single act of forced displacement of Arab citizens of Israel since the 1950s!
Please sign our petition and visit our Facebook page to find out what you can do to Stop the Prawer Plan!
Sign up for Adalah’s Newsletter to stay informed.

What is the Prawer Plan?

Arab Bedouin citizens of Israel, inhabitants of the Naqab (Negev) desert since the seventh century, are the most vulnerable community in Israel. For over 60 years, the indigenous Arab Bedouin have faced a state policy of displacement, home demolitions and dispossession of their ancestral land. Today, 70,000 Arab Bedouin citizens live in 35 villages that either predate the establishment of the State in 1948, or were created by Israeli military order in the early 1950s. The State of Israel considers the villages “unrecognized” and the inhabitants “trespassers on State land,” so it denies the citizens access to state infrastructure like water, electricity, sewage, education, health care and roads. The state deliberately withholds basic services from these villages to “encourage” the Arab Bedouin citizens to give up their ancestral land.In September 2011, the Israeli government approved the Prawer Plan, the brainchild of former Deputy Chair of the National Security Council, Mr. Ehud Prawer.  If implemented, the Prawer Plan will result in the destruction of the unrecognized villages and the forced displacement of up to 70,000 Arab Bedouin citizens. This plan was completed without consultation of the local community, and is a gross violation of the constitutional rights of the Arab Bedouin citizens to property, dignity, equality, adequate housing, and freedom to choose their own residence. Prawer is Happening Now

Despite complete rejection of the plan by the Arab Bedouin, and strong disapproval from the international community, Prawer is happening now. Media reports indicate that on 1 August 2012, a special police force will begin work to implement Prawer and demolish homes.  More than 1,000 houses were demolished in 2011 alone, and civil society is seeing the same practices in 2012.  Since Prawer was announced, the government announced plans that will displace over 10,000 people and plant forests, build military centers, and establish new Jewish settlements in their place.

In March 2012, the UN Committee on the Elimination for Racial Discrimination called on Israel to withdraw the proposed implementing legislation of the Prawer Plan, on the grounds that it was discriminatory.  If Israel applied the same criteria for planning and development that exist in the Jewish rural sector, all 35 unrecognized villages would be recognized where they are.

In July 2012, the European Parliament passed a historic resolution calling on Israel to Stop the Prawer Plan and its policies of displacement, eviction, and dispossession.

Adalah calls on the Israeli government to:

  • Cancel the Prawer Plan
  • Recognize the “unrecognized villages” and the land claims of the indigenous Arab Bedouin community
  • Halt home demolitions and forced evictions
  • Engage in meaningful dialogue with the Arab Bedouin community and the Arab political leadership to justly resolve the land claims
  • Invest in greater health, education, and employment opportunities for Arab Bedouin citizens of Israel
Find out More:
Briefing Paper: Analysis of the Prawer Plan
Briefing Paper: The Prawer Plan Bill
Adalah and ACRI Press Release: Prawer Plan Law Violates Rights of Bedouin
Four Reasons to Reject the Prawer Plan
The Arab Bedouin: Myths and Misconceptions
UN CERD Calls on Israel to Withdraw the Prawer Plan Law
European Parliament Pass Resolution Calling on Israel to Stop the Prawer Plan

 Mitt Romney at the Wailing Wall

Romney backs Israel’s right to strike Iran
By Tobias Buck, Financial Times
July 29, 2012

Jerusalem–Mitt Romney would not stand in the way of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, a senior adviser to the presumptive Republican presidential candidate has said.

“If Israel has to take action on its own, in order to stop Iran from developing that [nuclear weapons] capability, the governor would respect that decision,” said Dan Senor, a foreign policy adviser to Mr Romney, during the candidate’s visit to Israel.

The remarks, made to US journalists travelling with the candidate, came ahead of Mr Romney’s meeting on Sunday with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and other Israeli leaders.

They appear to set out a position that is more hawkish than that taken by the current US administration, which has made clear repeatedly that it opposes a military strike on Iran for the time being.

Senior US officials – including President Barack Obama – have stated on many occasions that the military option against Iran must remain “on the table”. However, officials and analysts say that Washington has also put intense pressure on Israel for now to give more time to diplomacy and sanctions to halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Mr Romney’s visit to Israel is widely seen as the most important, as well as the most sensitive, leg of his pre-election journey, which started in London last week. The former Massachusetts governor will be anxious not to repeat his widely criticised performance in the British capital, where he was publicly rebuked by political leaders for casting doubt over London’s readiness to host the Olympic Games.

The visit to Israel is significant above all because it comes amid a concerted Republican campaign to attract more votes from the American Jewish community, traditionally a bastion of Democrat support. At the heart of the Republican push is the claim that Mr Obama has not been sufficiently supportive of Israel, and the accusation that he has not been forceful enough in his dealings with Iran.

In an apparent bid to neutralise some of that criticism, the US leader on Friday announced a military aid package for Israel worth $70m.

Mr Romney himself has so far been careful not to voice direct criticism of the president’s policies while travelling abroad, in accordance with US political custom. However, he was due to give a foreign policy speech in Jerusalem on Sunday evening seeking to portray the Republican candidate as a staunch Israeli ally.

“When Iran’s leaders deny the Holocaust or speak of wiping this nation off the map, only the naive – or worse – will dismiss it as an excess of rhetoric,” according to extracts from the speech released by the Romney campaign on Sunday.

“Make no mistake: the ayatollahs in Tehran are testing our moral defences. They want to know who will object, and who will look the other way. My message to the people of Israel and the leaders of Iran is one and the same: I will not look away; and neither will my country.”

On Monday, Mr Romney is scheduled to hold a fundraising event in Jerusalem.

Israel coined the term “Nakba” and is still implementing it: The Electronic Intifada

20 July 2012

Home demolitions carried out today are a continuation of the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

(Mahfouz Abu Turk / APA images)

In the July lull between the two truces of the 1948 war that involved Israel and troops sent from neighboring Arab states to try and salvage Palestine, another stage in theethnic cleansing operation of the country was completed.

While in April 1948 the urban space of Palestine was almost completely destroyed by the Zionist forces, pockets of the rural areas and three towns, al-Lid, Ramleh andNazareth were still safe, but not for long.

Within the ten days of the lull (known in Israeli historiography as the “ten days war”), more Palestinian land was occupied and more people uprooted. The newly-born Jewish state promised the UN mediator at the time to cease fighting and explained that the July operations were just minor cleansing of pockets of resistance.

The UN did not buy the lie, but was already then a helpless and hapless organization. Only the city of Nazareth was spared and it is not very clear why. Zionist leader and Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who was very keen to depopulate it not only from its original inhabitants but also from the tens of thousands of refugees who found shelter there since May 1948, in the very last moment was convinced by someone to leave it intact.

But everywhere else the magnitude of the ruthless depopulation began to transpire clearly — before another two months passed it would be completed with the final destruction of the Palestinians in the Galilee and the Naqab (Negev) — respectively in the far north and south of Palestine.

Israel warned of “catastrophe”

Long before the Palestinians themselves understood what was the essence of the Israeli master plan to expel them, and the far-reaching implications of the country’s ethnic cleansing, the perpetrators themselves found an adequate term in Arabic to describe it: Nakba (catastrophe).

The term was mentioned for the first time not in Arab or Palestinian sources but in Israeli military intelligence sources. It appeared in leaflets the Israeli air force distributed during those ten days in July on the eve of a very singular attack on a village or a town.

The leaflets demanded in the main the “peaceful” eviction of the village and its surrounding areas. If not, the leaflets warned, the village would be severely punished. We do not have all the leaflets but here is the one rained on the huge and beautiful village of al-Tira near Haifa in the middle of July 1948:

“The sword will cut your throats without pity or compensation. If you insist and continue with your wrong doing … you should know that our airplanes, tanks and artillery will grind your village to dust, shell your houses, break you back, uproot you from your land … and your village will become a desert. Oh the people of al-Tira, if you wish to avoid a Nakba [sic] … surrender. The victorious Israeli army has already demolished the criminal hotbeds of Jaffa, Acre, Tiberias and Safad. It has occupied tens of villages in the south and the north, and this triumphant army will destroy you in several hours.”

Destruction and expulsion was a nakba in the eyes of the embryonic Israeli intelligence preparing the campaign of propaganda and intimidation against the native people of Palestine. Throughout the years, until this very day, the Nakba has continued by other means, this we know.

Dispossession

But in this summer of 2012 when our attention is focused on SyriaEgyptIran and the financial crisis — we are creating by this distraction from Palestine another lull in the never ending ethnic cleansing of Palestine. A dire situation helped also by the paralysis of Palestinian politics and the apathy of the international community.

The target of the new ethnic cleansing is, among others, the Bedouins of the Naqab. Next month, the Israeli authorities are going to begin to implement the Prawer plan for the dispossession of the Bedouins of the Naqab (named after Ehud Prawer, the deputy head of the Israeli National Security Council and head of the team of experts preparing it).

Until it was finalized and authorized in September last year by the government, the Israeli strategy to dislocate the 70,000 Palestinians from the south of the country was through strangulation: denying them electricity, water, education and access to any elementary infrastructure. A policy that by itself, had it been committed anywhere else in the world would have been condemned as a crime against humanity. But it has failed so far and did not deter or break the spirit and steadfastness of the Bedouins.

Hence the Prawer plan’s more active approach: it aims to destroy physically and by force the 35 villages in which these 70,000 people live. The early stages of this plan were already executed between last September and today: already 1,000 houses were demolished. The next stage would be far more comprehensive and deadly as a special police force has been established for its execution.

This is a test for a far more important Israeli master plan devised back in 2001 by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and perfected by a successor, Ehud Olmert, in 2007.

A unilateral — and if possible with at least a tacit Palestinian Authority agreement — scheme for the final demarcation of the 21st century state of Israel. The components of this strategy are a ghettoized Gaza Strip, annexation of Area C of the West Bank (a zone defined by the Oslo agreements, comprising more than 60 percent of the West Bank) to Israel, and the creation of a Palestinian Bantustan in the rest.

It also includes the ghettoization of the Palestinians in the Naqab; the strangulation of the Palestinians in the Galilee by an intensive construction of new Jewish settlementsthere; and the injection of Jewish population into the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, Ramleh and al-Lid (accompanied by the instalment of a new and complex web of roads and highways inside these areas).

Nakba 2012 — in contrast to Nakba 1948 — is done through municipal master-planning, administrative regulations and special police forces. It is incremental and bureaucratic and hence off the radar of a world that anyway does not seem to care much.

But for various reasons this more subtle criminal policy cannot be fully executed in the Naqab. This particular juncture is a chance to expose it worldwide as well as bring home the message that those who invented the term Nakba are still determined to fully implement it.

The author of numerous books, Ilan Pappe is professor of history and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter.

mistake: the ayatollahs in Tehran are testing our moral defences. They want to know who will object, and who will look the other way. My message to the people of Israel and the leaders of Iran is one and the same: I will not look away; and neither will my country.”

On Monday, Mr Romney is scheduled to hold a fundraising event in Jerusalem.

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