Israel’s pugnacious Foreign Minister is trying to put a legal veneer on his proposal to transfer Palestinian citizens into a future Palestinian state. Avigdor Lieberman has long pushed for stripping Palestinians in Israel of their citizenship, and now has a legal document in his hand claiming that his plan is in line with international law.
The legal document, first reported by Haaretz’s Barak Ravid, is an attempt by Foreign Minister Lieberman to insert his ideas for transfer into the mix as the U.S.-led peace process comes down to its final weeks. Lieberman wants to transfer Palestinian areas in what’s known as the Triangle–a group of northern towns and villages near the Green Line–to Palestinian Authority control in exchange for Israeli annexation of large settlement blocs like Ma’ale Adumim and Gush Etzion. An estimated 300,000 Palestinians live in the Triangle. In total, about 1.5 million Palestinians have Israeli citizenship.
Ravid reports that Ehud Keinan, a Foreign Ministry legal adviser, concluded that a transfer plan would be in line with international law if it fulfills three conditions: the consent of the Palestinian Authority; a prohibition on making a Palestinian stateless; and a compensation scheme for those who are left outside of Israel’s borders. The document cites historical precedents like the agreement to give French colonialists three years to choose between Algerian and French citizenship–an ironic example, since in this case it would be the victims of settler colonialism who have their citizenship stripped.
Tellingly, the document floats the idea of transferring the land and its inhabitants without their express consent. In Ravid’s telling, “Keinan says in the legal opinion that while the right to choice is accepted practice, it is not required by international law.” If the proposal ever becomes enacted, the opinion lays the groundwork for stripping the citizenship of Palestinians without their consent, since the vast majority of Palestinian citizens are vehemently opposed to such an arrangement. Palestinians reject being transferred to legitimize illegal settlements, and fear that a Palestinian state would still be subject to the whims of Israeli control. Palestinian Authority officials have previously rejected any population transfer.
The transfer plan, associated with Lieberman but backed by Israelis across the political spectrum, fulfills a number of key objectives.
As the American Civil Liberties Union’s Jamil Dakwar outlined in the Journal of Palestine Studies, the plan decreases the number of Palestinians within Israel, always a key concern for the self-described Jewish state that is constantly worried about Palestinian birth rates. Since the transfer proposal would be part of an agreement that establishes a Palestinian state, Israel could worry less about the ratio of Jews to Palestinians living within its territory. Secondly, it would give Israel the right to annex key settlement blocs it has always wanted international legitimacy for. And thirdly, it would remove what Israeli officials have called a “fifth column”–Palestinians within Israel. In recent years, Palestinian citizens have issued calls for Israel to change into a state of all its citizens–demands that the Shin Bet head called a “strategic threat to the state’s existence.”
Despite the Foreign Ministry’s determination, any plan to transfer Palestinian citizens would raise at least alarm bells in the international community. And as Dakwar notes, the plan could conflict with international treaties like the UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, which states: “A contracting state may not deprive any person or group of persons of their nationality on racial, ethnic, religious, or political grounds.” Israel is a signatory to the treaty.
The news of the legal document purporting to legitimize population transfer comes two and a half months after the Israeli news outlet Maariv reported that Israeli negotiators had proposed such a plan to the U.S. Days after the report was published, Lieberman affirmed his support for population transfer in a speech.
Palestinian activists and Members of Knesset slammed the proposal in response. Officials from the city of Umm al-Fahm called the proposal a “second Nakba” and said, “we are the children of this land. We inherited it from our ancestors, and nobody can speak or negotiate on our behalf in any future agreement with the Palestinians.”
Very revealing. Lieberman would rather give up territory than live on equal terms with Palestinians.
(And, of course, the usual Zionist inability to tell the difference between “legal” and “right”.)
>> Very revealing. Lieberman would rather give up territory than live on equal terms with Palestinians.
“Liberal Zionist” RW had similar feelings about equality:
>> “I personally don’t see a conflict with intentionally adjusting boundaries if the demographics change considerably to create a smaller Israel that is Jewish majority.”
IOW, maintain Jewish supremacism in Israel – and maintain Israel as a supremacist “Jewish State” – by re-drawing borders so as to exclude from Israel areas with large, non-Jewish populations. (Such an action would effectively strip those non-Jewish Israelis of their Israeli citizenship and render them stateless, but this didn’t seem to bother RW.)
Hateful, immoral and unjust: In a hyphenated word, Zio-supremacist.
Lieberman’s proposal is interesting to me for this reason: it validates my idea, posted long ago (2010), that Israel could live with PRoR (not that I hear Lieberman saying he’d accept PRoR) and also maintain a large Jewish majority within its own territory if Israel contracted its borders (removed to a smaller territory).
Of course, my idea was for Israel to make itself really small — as small, say, as New York City (all five boroughs) which has about the same population as Israel. That way, the PRoR would allow return of a small number of Palestinians because those that would return to the newly smaller Israel would return to a smaller area: fewer Palestinians would have been exiled from that smaller place in 1948 and therefore fewer would be entitled to return to it post-peace.
Of course, Lieberman is not proposing this plan. But he is pointing at it. He is saying that Israel does not have to be as large as it had hitherto desired to be.
Now we need only to get him (i.e., to get Israel) to agree to give up not only this small triangle of land but also all of the territories occupied in 1967. Oh, well.
By my creaky math eliminating 300,000 Arabs from the citizenship rolls would cut the untermensch population by a quarter. Along with the raising of the election threshold this will effective eliminate Arab participation in national politics. This is how fascism takes hold, not in one fell swoop but in increments.
“Despite the Foreign Ministry’s determination, any plan to transfer Palestinian citizens would raise at least alarm bells in the international community.” Those alarm bells have been going off for some time with no effect. Israel knows that it has a cadre of support that will forgive them anything. The old guard Jewish leadership has NEVER stood up for human rights in Israel and they never will.
What is GLARINGLY OBVIOUS in Lieberman spouting his vile ‘plan’ is the fact that he is admitting the territory where these settlement blocks are, IS NOT YET ISRAELI!
I.e., not in or yet a part of Israel. How can it be that the Israeli Government, knowing the settlement blocks are NOT YET ISRAELI, has been selling Israeli citizens non-Israeli land?
WAKE UP WORLD! These vile thieves are spitting in your eye!