In Saree Makdisi's 2008 book Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation he makes the important point that while the Israeli-Palestinian conflict receives the most international attention at times of great violence, the occupation can actually be best understood by looking at the daily challenges of Palestinian life under Israeli control. He describes in detail the "legal" and administrative mechanisms Israel has constructed to dispossess Palestinians of their land in order to expand its control through settlements, restricted roads, curfews and other laws which limit or bar Palestinian freedom of movement.
Today, Akiva Eldar reports in Haaretz on a newly discovered Israeli operation to strip West Bank Palestinians of their residency rights, which once again demonstrates Makdisi's point. Eldar explains:
Israel has used a covert procedure to cancel the residency status of 140,000 West Bank Palestinians between 1967 and 1994, the legal advisor for the Judea and Samaria Justice Ministry's office admits, in a new document obtained by Haaretz. The document was written after the Center for the Defense of the Individual filed a request under the Freedom of Information Law.
The document states that the procedure was used on Palestinian residents of the West Bank who traveled abroad between 1967 and 1994. From the occupation of the West Bank until the signing of the Oslo Accords, Palestinians who wished to travel abroad via Jordan were ordered to leave their ID cards at the Allenby Bridge border crossing.
The article continues:
If a Palestinian did not return within six months of the card's expiration, their documents would be sent to the regional census supervisor. Residents who failed to return on time were registered as NLRs -- no longer residents. The document makes no mention of any warning or information that the Palestinians received about the process. . .
The Central Bureau of Statistics says the West Bank's Palestinian population amounted to 1.05 million in 1994, which means the population would have been greater by about 14 percent if it weren't for the procedure.
Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat responded to the Haaretz report saying that the policy should be considered a war crime and amounts to "a systematic policy of displacement in order to gain land for the expansion of more settlement-colonies and to change the demographic composition of the occupied Palestinian territories."
Stories like this are a useful reminder that the ongoing displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people is a daily, and often mundane, affair, which is not to say that the results are any less devastating. As Makdisi writes after describing the story of one Palestinian family torn apart through a similar administrative obstacle:
Encounters like the mediated one between Sam Bahour and the Israeli soldier-administrator in Beit El may not be spectacular: since they occur on an individual and intimately personal scale, they are usually played out silently and invisibly. But, since they are the very tissue and fabric of which Israel's military occupation is made, they cumulatively set the stage for the more overt acts of violence surrounding them. Such violence does not always assume the form of large-scale combat. Much more often, the Israeli project of claiming land and, whenever possible, clearing it of Palestinians, takes palce in an endless chain of small, invisible, almost - but quite - banal episodes, the background music of the occupation, whose real significance only becomes apparent when it is cumulatively assessed.
Video from last Friday, May 6, entitled “Israeli army forces 6 families out of their land in Amniyr, South Hebron Hills”
link to youtube.com
IOF Soldier: “Old man, one minute and none will be here.”
Old man: “You said before that here was ok to stay.”
Soldier: “Did you hear? One minute and none here!”
Old man: “We will leave. But listen to me…”
“But where are the borders?”
Several families and children are then seeing standing around, talking with the soldiers. A soldier nonchalantly tosses a sound grenade, and a boy of probably 9 years flees, knowing exactly what the grenade is.
Wow, what vermin these IOF pigs are. A cancer.
i read this haaretz article last night @ midnight when i arrived home from a one week holiday. it just goes on and on and on. expose the truth everyday.
thanks adam
“[T]he occupation can actually be best understood by looking at the daily challenges of Palestinian life under Israeli control. ” That is the line that the late, great Israel Shahak — an Israeli anti-Zionist Jew — took in the 1980s when touring the USA, talking about the occupation. The small, daily indignities, the standing in line for permits (and not getting them), etc. These were the way to make the occupation palatably awful to American listeners, not bloodcurdling stories of major stuff. So he said.
Peter Beinart writes approvingly that ‘Israel was created not merely to be a Jewish democracy, but to be a Jewish refuge.’ Sounds lovely, in theory. But policies such as stripping Palestinians of their West Bank residency through trickery are where the rubber meets the road, in terms of maintaining Israel’s character as a Jewish state.
Through legal subterfuge, economic oppression, and (when all else fails) military violence, ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is the logical and necessary consequence of ‘Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.’
The Jewish refuge where they were all turned into Zionists.
Listen to this sephardi music- you can take the man out of the Middle East but you can’t take the Middle East out of the man..
link to youtube.com
link to youtube.com
Arab Jews in Poland taunting the Poles about the Nazis
link to youtube.com
What a f$cked up Zionist education they must have had
I keep trying to figure out how the ‘Jewish refuge’ will end because I don’t see how it can last.
The only support in the world Israel has is US politicians, the US zionist and a few abroad, and the German politicians, and not all of them …. that’s it, that’s all it’s got.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that 90% of the world and 90% of the world’s other governments are fed up with Israel.
Perhaps it’s possible that Israel can continue the creeping, one step just this side of genocide, swallowing of Palestine until it’s gone but there are problems in that success. First Egypt and Jordon aren’t going to want to have to take in millions of Palestinians —even in a slow dribble. Second, if Israel does swallow Palestine and take in the Palestines it would really be an apartheid state writ large and how long could that last. An apartheid state means Israel would get cut off in a way that would make the current BDS look mild. Third, Israel, in time, would eventually face it’s own Arab Spring Revolt from it’s Palestine underclass.
Nope, I don’t see it ever lasting no matter how gradually their goal is implemented with actions like those shown in this article. The bottom line is the Israel ‘goal’ will not be sustainable ‘long term’ even if they achieve it. If they win now, they lose later. And when that happens there won’t be any world sympathy or support to pick them up and put them on their feet again.
canada under harper is working hard to do the same as the us politicians… must be something in it for him……….. it definitely isn’t a balanced outlook on his part…
Yup, the amount of “application of tongue to backside” that the Canadian government is doing vis-à-vis Israeli s embarrassing. We’ve even adopted the same mindless pro-Israel (“special relationship”, “Jewish state”, etc.) and anti-Palestinian (terrorists, anti-Semitic, etc.) language as the U.S. *sigh*
Adam, this is a VERY important post.
A common Zionist LIE is that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine has ceased (or never existed if they are especially crazy Zionists).
Just the other day Hophmi was asking (from his perspective, ‘rhetorically’) how many Palestinians have been ethnically cleansed from the West Bank and Gaza. OBVIOUSLY it’s an intellectually dishonest question. We know that the Palestinians are being DISPOSSESSED. They are losing their property and homes. They are LOSING THEIR LANDS. Is that so difficult to grasp? And this guy – the same person who is color-blind to a Nazi-like propaganda cartoon that paints the Palestinians as snakes – tries to brush it off.
Very important post and I’m glad it’s been made soon after Hophmi’s recent lie.
Where did all the dispossessed Palestinians go? Jordan?
They don’t all go to Jordan. They go wherever they can get a job, with large numbers all throughout the Middle East, but also throughout the world. We live in Asia and there’s a family from Bethlehem running the local shawarma shop. It’s infuriating that Israel, an occupier, can strip native people of their residency rights, and it’s mind-boggling to consider how each individual Palestinian is faced with a life-long struggle to get and maintain some kind of right of residency somewhere, anywhere. Meanwhile, Israelis have multiple passports and travel freely.
This is why the Nakba did not end in 1949. As well as a second “hot” round in 1967, the “cool” ethnic cleansing of Palestine continues each and every day. This is what Jeff Halper calls “quiet transfer”.
“The document makes no mention of any warning or information that the Palestinians received about the process. . .”
The information is freely available. The process is quite clearly described in Regulation 1045/a/17/x. A copy (in Hebrew) for public perusal is kept in a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory in the basement of the Tel Aviv office of the Committee for Public Safety. Once you get past the armed guards and climb over the barrier at the top of the stairs, you can go down and find it. Look for the door marked “Beware of the Leopard”.
If people are too lazy to take an interest in local affairs, I have no sympathy.
And the sad part is, that if this were really true, there would be some people on this site who would say that such a situation is fine and dandy.
This was just up until 1994 – the same year that the Oslo Accords were signed. Oslo has been the effective administrative procedure since then.
Under Oslo, Israel takes administrative and military control of Area C. Israel has military (policing) control of Area B, and the PA has administrative control of Area B. And Area A is the full responsibility of the PA.
This effectively gave 59% of the West Bank (Area C) to Israel. If Palestinians are being cleared from their land, their only legal recourse is to go to Israeli courts. Which means that they’re basically defenseless.
As the video in my first comment on this entry shows, the ethnic cleansing is happening right now.
This practice did not stop in 1994 by a long shot.
B’Tselem: The Quiet Deportation – April 1997
The Independent, Patrick Cockburn reports, April 1997:
B’Tselem: Revocation of residency in East Jerusalem – new tactics
B’TSelem: New military order defines tens of thousands of Palestinian “infiltrators” who may be expelled and imprisoned – April 2010
Jordan will not receive deported Palestinians – December 2010
Munther Fahmi, bookseller to the stars at East Jerusalem’s famous American Colony Hotel, facing deportation – April 2011
HAMOKED – Center for the Defense of the Individual – Detailed information site about the history, timeline, legal particulars for these types of deportations
And on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on….
Bump, I hope all the regulars have this important post favorite’d!
thanks cliff, i agree