The Palestinians of Israel are poised to take centre
stage

With the peace process going nowhere, common experience
on both sides of the Green Line is creating a new
reality

Seumas Milne 
Wednesday 10 November 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/10/palestinians-poised-to-take-centre-stage o

In a quiet street in the Sheikh Jarrah district of
occupied East Jerusalem 88-year-old Rifka al-Kurd is
explaining how she came to live in the house she and
her husband built as Palestinian refugees in the 1950s.
As she speaks, three young ultra-orthodox Jewish
settlers swagger in to stake their claim to the front
part of the building, shouting abuse in Hebrew and
broken Arabic: "Arab animals", "shut up, whore".

There is a brief physical confrontation with Rifka's
daughter as the settlers barricade themselves in to the
rooms they have occupied since last winter. That was
when they finally won a court order to take over the
Kurd family's extension on the grounds that it was
built without permission - which Palestinians in
Jerusalem are almost never granted. It is an ugly
scene, the settlers' chilling arrogance underpinned by
the certain knowledge that they can call in the police
and army at will.

But such takeovers of Palestinian homes in Sheikh
Jarrah have become commonplace, and the focus of
continual protest. The same is true in nearby Silwan,
home to upwards of 30,000 Palestinians next to the Old
City, where 88 homes to 1,500 Palestinians have been
lined up for demolition to make way for a King David
theme park and hundreds of settlers are protected round
the clock by trigger-happy security guards.

Throughout the Arab areas of Jerusalem, as in the West
Bank, the government is pressing ahead with land
expropriations, demolitions and settlement building,
making the prospects of a Palestinian state ever more
improbable. More than a third of the land in East
Jerusalem has been expropriated since it was occupied
in 1967 to make way for Israeli colonists, in flagrant
violation of international law.

Israel's latest settlement plans were not "helpful",
Barack Obama ventured on Tuesday. But while
US-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian negotiations go
nowhere and attention has been focused on the brutal
siege of Gaza, the colonisation goes on. It is also
proceeding apace in Israel proper, where the demolition
of Palestinian Bedouin villages around the Negev desert
has accelerated under Binyamin Netanyahu.

About 87,000 Bedouin live in 45 "unrecognised"
villages, without rights or basic public services,
because the Israeli authorities refuse to recognise
their claim to the land. All have demolition orders
hanging over them, while hundreds of Jewish settlements
have been established throughout the area.

The Israeli writer Amos Oz calls the Negev a "ticking
time bomb". The village of Araqeeb has been destroyed
six times in recent months and each time it has been
reconstructed by its inhabitants. The government wants
to clear the land and move the Bedouin into designated
townships. But even there, demolitions are carried out
on a routine basis.

At the weekend, a mosque in the Bedouin town of Rahat
was torn down by the army in the night. By Sunday
afternoon, local people were already at work on
rebuilding it, as patriotic songs blared out from the
PA system and activists addressed an angry crowd.

The awakening of the Negev Bedouin, many of whom used
to send their sons to fight in the Israeli army,
reflects a wider politicisation of the Arab citizens of
Israel. Cut off from the majority of Palestinians after
1948, they tried to find an accommodation with the
state whose discrimination against them was, in the
words of former prime minister Ehud Olmert,
"deep-seated and intolerable" from the first.

That effort has as good as been abandoned. The Arab
parties in the Israeli Knesset now reject any idea of
Israel as an ethnically defined state, demanding
instead a "state of all its people". The influential
Islamic Movement refuses to take part in the Israeli
political system at all. The Palestinians of '48, who
now make up getting on for 20% of the population, are
increasingly organising themselves on an independent
basis - and in common cause with their fellow
Palestinians across the Green Line.

Palestinian experience inside Israel, from land
confiscations to settlement building and privileged
ethnic segregation, is not after all so different from
what has taken place in East Jerusalem and the West
Bank. After 1948, the Palestinians of Jaffa who
survived ethnic cleansing were forced to share their
houses with Jewish settlers - just as Rifka al-Kurd is
in Jerusalem today. The sense of being one people is
deepening.

That has been intensified by ever more aggressive
attempts under the Netanyahu government to bring
Israel's Arab citizens to heel, along with growing
demands to transfer hundreds of thousands of them to a
future West Bank administration. A string of new laws
targeting the Palestinian minority are in the pipeline,
including the bill agreed by the Israeli cabinet last
month requiring all new non-Jewish citizens to swear an
oath of allegiance to Israel as a Jewish state.

Pressure on Palestinian leaders and communities is
becoming harsher. A fortnight ago more than a thousand
soldiers and police were on hand to protect a violent
march by a far-right racist Israeli group through the
Palestinian town of Umm al-Fahm. The leader of the
Islamic Movement, Ra'ed Salah, is in prison for
spitting at a policeman; the Palestinian MP Haneen
Zoabi has been stripped of her parliamentary privileges
for joining the Gaza flotilla; and leading civil rights
campaigner Ameer Makhoul faces up to 10 years in jail
after being convicted of the improbable charge of
spying for Hezbollah.

Meanwhile Israel is also demanding that the Palestinian
leadership in Ramallah recognise Israel as a Jewish
state as part of any agreement. Few outside the
Palestinian Authority - or even inside it - seem to
believe that the "peace process" will lead to any kind
of settlement. Even Fatah leaders such as Nabil Sha'ath
now argue that the Palestinians need to consider a
return to armed resistance, or a shift to the South
African model of mass popular resistance, also favoured
by prominent Palestinians in Israel.

As for the people who actually won the last elections,
Mahmoud Ramahi, the Hamas secretary general of the
Palestinian parliament, reminded me on Monday that the
US continues to veto any reconciliation with Fatah. He
was arrested by the Israelis barely 24 hours later,
just as talks between the two parties were getting
going in Damascus.

The focus of the Palestinian-Israeli struggle has
shifted over the last 40 years from Jordan to Lebanon
to the occupied territories. With the two-state
solution close to collapse, it may be that the
Palestinians of Israel are at last about to move centre
stage. If so, the conflict that more than any other has
taken on a global dimension will have finally come full
circle.

___________________________________________

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