As Alex Kane noted yesterday, high Israeli officials are pushing a scheme in which it would “transfer” communities containing 300,000 Palestinian citizens to Palestinian sovereignty under any proposed peace plan so as to bolster the Jewish majority in Israel.
Afif Abu-Much, a high tech specialist who lives in the Palestinian city of Baqa al-Gharbiyye in the “triangle” of targeted communities near the Green Line, has a post up describing his anger over this proposal at journalist Tal Schneider’s site. Abu-Much is the kind of Palestinian American supporters of Israel point to as examples, because he has worked to increase interaction between Jews and Palestinians. For instance, in the video above, he describes the difficulties Palestinians face getting employment in Israeli high-tech businesses. “My message to my Arab colleagues… Please don’t give up. Keep on trying to get working in high-tech. It’s not easy but at the same time it’s not impossible. This is my message in life.”
From his post yesterday:
It has been reported this week that Israel has proposed to the US administration to consider the transfer of certain Israeli areas located within the Triangle, to Palestinian sovereignty. Some 300 thousand Israeli Arab citizens live there. The idea is to compensate the Palestinian Authority (PA) for the annexation of the settlement blocs in the framework of the land exchange between the parties.
Were the plan to come into fruition, the Arab proportion of the Israeli population would drop to 12 per cent, which may please some of the parties participating in the negotiations between Israel and the PA. At this stage it seems as if the Americans have not responded and it is far from certain whether the Palestinians would agree to taking populated areas containing infrastructure dating back to the ‘fifties in return for the settlements. Nevertheless there is no doubt that the proposal shows the kind of thinking which is prevalent in the upper echelons of government in regard to both the Israeli Arab population on one hand and the settlers and settlements on the other.
ֿI am an Arab citizen who lives in the community of Baqa al-Gharbiyye in the Triangle [near the Green Line], a region that Israel has proposed hand over. Every month about half my wages are taken by state in taxes so that the Prime Minister would have the ability to buy ice cream for 10,000 shekels per annum, scented candles for 6000 and allow himself to squander water to the tune of 80,000 shekels (not to mention the half million spent on that bed for Thatcher’s funeral etc.)
The taxes that I’m compelled to pay by law, financed the construction of the settlements. Over the same period, my community and other Arab communities rarely saw anything in return for those taxes. All Israeli governments over the years have been meticulous in channeling the money to the settlements and not to those places which were in need of it. Now, as a New Year “present” , they are going to move me and my family, deprive me of my citizenship (do they have the legal right to do it?) and all that in order to keep the settlement blocs as part of Israel.
Why we should be used as a bartering object for the purpose of keeping the settlements? In what way are people who live there superior to Arab citizens? On the contrary, nothing does more harm to Israel’s image than the settlements. It not for nothing that Israeli law has not been applied there and the place is under military rule. Have you ever heard an American or European leader attack or condemn Israel because of the Arab communities in the Triangle, the Galilee, or the Negev?
The status of the settlements is a controversial matter in international law. Most countries are opposed to the policy that led to the establishment of the settlements and their continuing expansion. Israel has been criticized, condemned and has been on the receiving end of countless reprimands by US, European officials as well as the UN Security Council. Those criticisms stemmed from the fact that the existence of the settlements is a violation of international law. Israel has also been described as an Apartheid state because of the settlements, and because of the suffering caused to the Palestinian population in the Territories.
It is simply wrong to place Arab towns and villages and the settlement blocs on the same level. Those who lives across the Green Line and beyond the State’s “borders” are the settlers and not the Arab citizens. Those who inflict damage on, and undermine the peace negotiations, are the settlers and not the Arab community. Accordingly, this proposal – the transfer of Arab citizens to the Palestinian Authority as if we were dealing with a herd of sheep and not citizens of the state – is unacceptable. It also contains a not inconsiderable number of backward ideas. What is happening here is trafficking in humans beings — citizens who happen to belong to a minority.
Finally, just imagine what would happen if one day the President of United States, Barack Obama, were to propose to transfer sovereignty of certain parts of the US populated by the Jewish minority to another country (say Cuba) as compensation for other regions and thereby reduce the number of Jewish citizens in the US.
How would that be viewed? How would it have been taken in this country? What would be the reactions within the government? How would Prime Minister respond? Here is your answer: Straightaway everyone would rise and scream and yell and shout and call Obama an anti-semite, a racist, a President of an Apartheid country, a person devoid of human feelings and so on. What is the difference between that and the Israeli offer to transfer me and my family as compensation for the annexation of settlement blocs in Judea and Samaria?
Translation from Hebrew with the kind assistance of Sol Salbe.
The piece has also been posted by Mitchell Plitnick. Update: I changed my headline to reflect the issue here, one of citizenship.
just curious why the title says canada instead of cuba, as represented in the text?
anyway, excellent post.
1. Better warm Cuba than the “Great White North” of Canada! ;-)
2. Whether it’s done by the U.S. or by the supremacist “Jewish State” of Israel, “transferring sovereignty” – stripping legitimate citizens of their nationality – is unjust and immoral. Given that Zio-supremacists are unjust and immoral people, it makes perfect sense for them to champion such a move.
”Finally, just imagine what would happen if one day the President of United States, Barack Obama, were to propose to transfer sovereignty of certain parts of the US populated by the Jewish minority to another country (say Cuba) as compensation for other regions and thereby reduce the number of Jewish citizens in the US.”
lol……just imagine if Obama declared the US was going to transfer all the Jews in Fla. or NY to Israel in exchange for giving all the Palestine refugees, or any other Palestines who so elect, their place in those states and US citizenship.
Or if he purposed to send Israel all the Jewish Russian refugee immigrants in the US from the 90’s and take in an equal number of Palestine refugees.
Or if he just purposed sending all the dual citizen Israelis now living and working in the US back to Israel and taking in a equal number of Palestine refugees.
The sound of US Jewish heads exploding would be deafening….but Netanyahu would love it, so maybe Kerry should put that offer on the I/P table as a trade off for Palestine acknowledging Israel as a Jewish State.
Exactly. Can you imagine the uproar from the media, pundits and ethnic lobbies should the US government ever suggest transferring, say, 10,000 Hassidic Jews from NYC to Alabama or 50,000 Hispanics from California to Oregon for purposes of demographic balance or for any economic or social reason for that matter?
To someone unfamiliar with the conflict, the case made here doesn’t really make sense. In most countries, when there’s a region populated mainly by members of a minority group with grievances against the central government, the government refuses to give up that territory, and so there is often separatist sentiment, sometimes even turning into violence, such as in Nagorno-Karabakh (Armenian-populated region of Azerbaijan), South Ossetia (Russian-populated region of Georgia), Kashmir, South Sudan (before its separation from Sudan), and elsewhere. Now what if the Georgian president announced, “Henceforth, South Ossetia will no longer be a part of Georgia; I am transferring this area to Russia”? This would be seen as a major concession by Georgia, and the Russians would be very happy about it, EVEN IF the Georgian president said that his reason for doing this was to increase the proportion of ethnic Georgians in the population of Georgia. Of course, no government ever makes a concession like this; instead, the major concession is allowing for a referendum to be held in the region at issue, when it is known that separatist sentiment is predominant. That’s what happened in South Sudan, and it IS telling that Israeli leaders pushing this proposal aren’t calling instead for a referendum in the region they’d like to transfer.
MW readers know that the real issue is that Israel (enabled by its powerful friend with no daylight between them) will see to it that the putative State of Palestine will be effectively a vassal state under Israeli suzerainty. This is what must be communicated, or else the message is lost on the audience we’re trying to reach. I think this “pro-Israel” sentiment among Palestinian citizens of Israel (in a sense, that’s undeniably what it is) can even be spun in a way that shows there is hope for peace and a mutually beneficial solution.