“Don’t wave your purple-dyed finger at me and tell me you believe in democracy, until the 5.3 million Palestinian and 5.2 million Jewish residents of Palestine-Israel have an equal voice in deciding how they will live – together or apart – in the land they share.”
Lawrence of Cyberia in Paging Natan Sharansky, referenced by Leila Khaled Mouammar in Privatizing Apartheid in Israel [ 11 December 2005 ZNet ], who links the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and the Israel Lands Administration (ILA) to the takeover plans for the Negev and Galilee, another racist land grab that Israel hopes will be funded with U.S. tax dollars.
No Palestinian citizen of Israel will benefit from the Israeli Cabinet’s decision to drop the prices for land for new housing construction projects in the Galilee by 20% – 40%, beginning in July 2005, for a period of two years. This was ensured by allocating Galilee lands to the JNF.
While some Palestinian citizens do own land, often passed down from parents and grandparents, they face restrictions on its use. Much of the land that Palestinians own has purposefully been designated by the Israeli state as for “agricultural purposes” only. Unable to purchase or lease land elsewhere, Palestinians have often built on these lands, only to have their homes destroyed.
A 1996 Ministry of Interior report noted that though 57% of unlicensed building inside Israel was carried out by Palestinians, 90% of all house demolitions were carried out against Palestinian homes. There are over 16,000 outstanding demolition orders in the Galilee alone.
In the Negev, the situation is even worse. There are some 46 unrecognized villages in the Negev that do not appear on any Israeli maps.
The JNF plans to develop new Jewish communities there under the name of settlement project “Blueprint Negev,” (www.jnf.org/negev/facts.html). There is no recognition on the JNF website of the existence or rights of the 46 Palestinian villages.
Land confiscations, house demolitions, and aerial spraying of toxic pesticides are tools used by the Israeli State to make the erasure of these villages from the map a reality. For more information, see the website of The Association of 40 at www.assoc40.org/index_main.html.
Leila Khaled Mouammar reminds that, “Prior to the dismantlement of the apartheid regime in South Africa, the privatization of state assets and services was quietly undertaken in order to ensure that the loss of political power would not also mean the loss of an economic status quo beneficial to the White minority.”
Predictably, as the immigration debate stirs up Congress, Palestinian rights will likely be ignored in this latest of Israel’s illegal and immoral expansions. U.S.-supported democracies serve its White minority or serve no one at all.
Condoleezza Rice was nearly described as a miracle worker when she announced that after one night of talks she’d negotiated passage for the Palestinians between the West Bank and Gaza “that would begin to operate with ‘convoys of buses’ on December 15.” Gideon Levy in The safe passage: The history of a farce [ 11 December 2005 Ha’aretz ] puts Rice’s diplomatic efforts into perspective whilst delivering the news no such operation will begin. Ilan Pappe cautions in The Disappointing Trajectory of Amir Peretz [ Vol. 27 No. 24 15 December 2005 London Review of Books ]:
Israel needs a greater revolution than the election of Amir Peretz. The peace initiatives – or at any rate their short-term goals – have not changed since Israel occupied the territories in 1967. What is new is the growing realisation among grass-roots organisations worldwide, led by the hundreds of NGOs which now constitute Palestinian civil society, that previous methods to bring peace have failed. Diplomatic efforts have led nowhere and have inadvertently allowed the Israelis to widen the occupation and introduce even more oppressive and cruel mechanisms of control, intimidation and dispossession. Palestinian armed struggle has also failed to produce any tangible results and its victims are not only Israelis but large sections of Palestinian society. Only one option remains: strong international pressure, of the kind that was directed against apartheid South Africa in the form of sanctions, boycotts and disinvestments.
It is in illusionary moments like this – with Peretz portrayed as the bright new star – that committed people suddenly stop thinking, pinning their hopes once more on diplomacy and on the ability of Israeli Jewish society to provide the kind of change from within that might end the occupation. The illusion won’t last: all those Israelis who, at great risk to their lives, protest against the apartheid wall, who monitor the roadblocks, who refuse to serve in the army of occupation but instead do everything they can to help the Palestinians living under the yoke of occupation, need a change more significant than any Amir Peretz will bring. And so do the Palestinians, who have not only endured one of the longest and harshest occupations of modern times but have suffered false promises of liberation whenever a leader supposedly committed to peace has emerged in Israel only to show himself committed to Zionism in such a way as to preclude any meaningful chance of solving the conflict.
The Democrats are having none of it. At the DNC Winter Meeting in Phoenix, Arizona this month they “voted unanimously to formally condemn any efforts to boycott or divest from companies doing business in Israel.” The Progressive Democrats of America mention nary a word of this vote and have so far ignored the one person who does.