Israel's Dark Future
by Jonathan Cook
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/cook.php?articleid=10359


When I published my book Blood and Religion last year, I sought not
only to explain what lay behind Israeli policies since the failed Camp
David negotiations nearly seven years ago, including the disengagement
from Gaza and the building of a wall across the West Bank, but I also
offered a few suggestions about where Israel might head next.

Making predictions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might be
considered a particularly dangerous form of hubris, but I could hardly
have guessed how soon my fears would be realized.

One of the main forecasts of my book was that Palestinians on both
sides of the Green Line â€" those who currently enjoy Israeli
citizenship and those who live as oppressed subjects of Israel's
occupation â€" would soon find common cause as Israel tries to seal
itself off from what it calls the Palestinian "demographic threat":
that is, the moment when Palestinians outnumber Jews in the land
between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

I suggested that Israel's greatest fear was ruling over a majority of
Palestinians and being compared to apartheid South Africa, a fate that
has possibly befallen it faster than I expected with the recent
publication of Jimmy Carter's book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. To
avoid such a comparison, I argued, Israel was creating a "Jewish
fortress," separating â€" at least demographically â€" from Palestinians
in the occupied territories by sealing off Gaza through a
disengagement of its settler population and by building a 750km wall
to annex large areas of the West Bank.

It was also closing off the last remaining avenue of a Right of Return
for Palestinians by changing the law to make it all but impossible for
Palestinians living in Israel to marry Palestinians in the occupied
territories and thereby gain them citizenship.

The corollary of this Jewish fortress, I suggested, would be a sham
Palestinian state, a series of disconnected ghettos that would prevent
Palestinians from organizing effective resistance, non-violent or
otherwise, but which would give the Israeli army an excuse to attack
or invade whenever they chose, claiming that they were facing
an "enemy state" in a conventional war.

Another benefit for Israel in imposing this arrangement would be that
it could say all Palestinians who identified themselves as such â€"
whether in the occupied territories or inside Israel â€" must now
exercise their sovereign rights in the Palestinian state and renounce
any claim on the Jewish state. The apartheid threat would be nullified.

I sketched out possible routes by which Israel could achieve this end:

* by redrawing the borders, using the wall, so that an area densely
populated with Palestinian citizens of Israel known as the Little
Triangle, which hugs the northern West Bank, would be sealed into the
new pseudo-state;
* by continuing the process of corralling the Negev's Bedouin farmers
into urban reservations and then treating them as guest workers;
* by forcing Palestinian citizens living in the Galilee to pledge an
oath of loyalty to Israel as a "Jewish and democratic state" or have
their citizenship revoked;
* and by stripping Arab Knesset members of their right to stand for
election.

When I made these forecasts, I suspected that many observers, even in
the Palestinian solidarity movement, would find my ideas improbable. I
could not have realized how fast events would overtake prediction.

The first sign came in October with the addition to the cabinet of
Avigdor Lieberman, leader of a party that espouses the ethnic
cleansing not only of Palestinians in the occupied territories (an
unremarkable platform for an Israeli party) but of Palestinian
citizens too, through land swaps that would exchange their areas for
the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Lieberman is not just any cabinet minister; he has been appointed
deputy prime minister with responsibility for the "strategic threats"
that face Israel. In that role, he will be able to determine what
issues are to be considered threats and thereby shape the public
agenda for next few years. The "problem" of Israel's Palestinian
citizens is certain to be high on his list.

Lieberman has been widely presented as a political maverick, akin to
the notorious racist Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose Kach party was outlawed
in the late 1980s. That is a gross misunderstanding: Lieberman is at
the very heart of the country's rightwing establishment and will
almost certainly be a candidate for prime minister in future
elections, as Israelis drift ever further to the right.

Unlike Kahane, Lieberman has cleverly remained within the Israeli
political mainstream while pushing its agenda to the very limits of
what it is currently possible to say. Kadima and Labor urgently want
unilateral separation from the Palestinians but are shy to spell out,
both to their own domestic constituency and the international
community, what separation will entail.

Lieberman has no such qualms. He is unequivocal: if Israel is
separating from the Palestinians in parts of the occupied territories,
why not also separate from the 1.2 million Palestinians who through
oversight rather than design ended up as citizens of a Jewish state in
1948? If Israel is to be a Jewish fortress, then, as he points out, it
is illogical to leave Palestinians within the fortifications.

These arguments express the common mood among the Israeli public, one
that has been cultivated since the eruption of the intifada in 2000 by
endless talk among Israel's political and military elites
about "demographic separation." Regular opinion polls show that about
two-thirds of Israelis support transfer, either voluntary or forced,
of Palestinian citizens from the state.

Recent polls also reveal how fashionable racism has become in Israel.
A survey conducted last year showed that 68 per cent of Israeli Jews
do not want to live next to a Palestinian citizen (and rarely have to,
as segregation is largely enforced by the authorities), and 46 per
cent would not want an Arab to visit their home.

A poll of students that was published last week suggests that racism
is even stronger among young Jews. Three-quarters believed Palestinian
citizens are uneducated, uncivilized and unclean, and a third are
frightened of them. Richard Kupermintz of Haifa University, who
conducted the survey more than two years ago, believes the responses
would be even more extreme today.

Lieberman is simply riding the wave of such racism and pointing out
the inevitable path separation must follow if it is to satisfy these
kinds of prejudices. He may speak his mind more than his cabinet
colleagues, but they too share his vision of the future. That is why
only one minister, the dovish and principled Ophir Pines Paz of Labor,
resigned over Ehud Olmert's inclusion of Lieberman in the cabinet.

Contrast that response with the uproar caused by the Labor leader Amir
Peretz's appointment of the first Arab cabinet minister in Israel's
history. (A member of the small Druze community, which serves in the
Israeli army, Salah Tarif, was briefly a minister without portfolio in
Sharon's first government.)

Raleb Majadele, a Muslim, is a senior member of the Labor party and a
Zionist (what might be termed, in different circumstances, a self-
hating Arab or an Uncle Tom), and yet his appointment has broken an
Israeli taboo: Arabs are not supposed to get too close to the centers
of power.

Peretz's decision was entirely cynical. He is under threat on all
fronts â€" from his coalition partners in Kadima and in Lieberman's
Yisrael Beitenu, and from within his own party â€" and desperately needs
the backing of Labor's Arab party members. Majadele is the key, and
that is why Peretz gave him a cabinet post, even if a marginal one:
Minister of Science, Culture and Sport.

But the right is deeply unhappy at Majadele's inclusion in the
cabinet. Lieberman called Peretz unfit to be defense minister for
making the appointment and demanded that Majadele pledge loyalty to
Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Lieberman's party colleagues
referred to the appointment as a "lethal blow to Zionism."

A few Labor and Meretz MKs denounced these comments as racist. But
more telling was the silence of Olmert and his Kadima party, as well
as Binyamin Netanyhu's Likud, at Lieberman's outburst. The center and
right understand that Lieberman's views about Majadele, and
Palestinian citizens more generally, mirror those of most Israeli Jews
and that it would be foolhardy to criticize him for expressing them â€"
let alone sack him.

In this game of "who is the truer Zionist," Lieberman can only grow
stronger against his former colleagues in Kadima and Likud. Because he
is free to speak his and their minds, while they must keep quiet for
appearance's sake, he, not they, will win ever greater respect from
the Israeli public.

Meanwhile, all the evidence suggests that Olmert and the current
government will implement the policies being promoted by Lieberman,
even if they are too timid to openly admit that is what they are doing.

Some of those policies are of the by-now familiar variety, such as the
destruction of 21 Bedouin homes, half the village of Twayil, in the
northern Negev last week. It was the second time in a month that the
village had been razed by the Israeli security forces.

These kind of official attacks against the indigenous Bedouin â€" who
have been classified by the government as "squatters" on state lands â€"
are a regular occurence, an attempt to force 70,000 Bedouin to leave
their ancestral homes and relocate to deprived townships.

A more revealing development came this month, however, when it was
reported in the Israeli media that the government is for the first
time backing "loyalty" legislation that has been introduced privately
by a Likud MK. Gilad Erdan's bill would revoke the citizenship of
Israelis who take part in "an act that constitutes a breach of loyalty
to the state," the latest in a string of proposals by Jewish MKs
conditioning citizenship on loyalty to the Israeli state, defined in
all these schemes very narrowly as a "Jewish and democratic" state.

Arab MKs, who reject an ethnic definition of Israel and demand instead
that the country be reformed into a "state of all its citizens," or a
liberal democracy, are typically denounced as traitors.

Lieberman himself suggested just such a loyalty scheme for Palestinian
citizens last month during a trip to Washington. He told American
Jewish leaders: "He who is not ready to recognize Israel as a Jewish
and Zionist state cannot be a citizen in the country."

Erdan's bill specifies acts of disloyalty that include visiting
an "enemy state" â€" which, in practice, means just about any Arab
state. Most observers believe that, after Erdan's bill has been
redrafted by the Justice Ministry, it will be used primarily against
the Arab MKs, who are looking increasingly beleaguered. Most have been
repeatedly investigated by the Attorney-General for any comment in
support of the Palestinians in the occupied territories or for
visiting neighboring Arab states. One, Azmi Bishara, has been put on
trial twice for these offenses.

Meanwhile, Jewish MKs have been allowed to make the most outrageous
racist statements against Palestinian citizens, mostly unchallenged.

Former cabinet minister Effi Eitam, for example, said back in
September: "The vast majority of West Bank Arabs must be deported ...
We will have to make an additional decision, banning Israeli Arabs
from the political system … We have cultivated a fifth column, a group
of traitors of the first degree." He was "warned" by the Attorney-
General over his comments (though he has expressed similar views
several times before), but remained unrepetant, calling the warning an
attempt to "silence" him.

The leader of the opposition and former prime minister, Binyamin
Netanyahu, the most popular politician in Israel according to polls,
gave voice to equally racist sentiments this month when he stated that
child allowance cuts he imposed as finance minister in 2002 had had
a "positive" demographic effect by reducing the birth rate of
Palestinian citizens.

Arab MKs, of course, do not enjoy such indulgence when they speak out,
much more legitimately, in supporting their kin, the Palestinians of
the West Bank and Gaza, who are suffering under Israel's illegal
occupation. Arab MK Ahmed Tibi, for example, was roundly condemned
last week by the Jewish parties, including the most leftwing, Meretz,
when he called on Fatah to "continue the struggle" to establish a
Palestinian state.

However, the campaign of intimidation by the government and Jewish
members of the Knesset has failed to silence the Arab MKs or stop them
visiting neighboring states, which is why the pressure is being ramped
up. If Erdan's bill becomes law â€" which seems possible with government
backing â€" then the Arab MKs and the minority they represent will
either be cut off from the rest of the Arab world once again (as they
were for the first two decades of Israel's existence, when a military
government was imposed on them) or threatened with the revocation of
their citizenship for disloyalty (a move, it should be noted, that is
illegal under international law).

It may not be too fanciful to see the current legislation eventually
being extended to cover other "breaches of loyalty," such as demanding
democratic reforms of Israel or denying that a Jewish state is
democratic. Technically, this is already the position as Israel's
election law makes it illegal for political parties, including Arab
ones, to promote a platform that denies Israel's existence as
a "Jewish and democratic" state.

Soon Arab MKs and their constituents may also be liable to having
their citizenship revoked for campaigning, as many currently do, for a
state of all its citizens. That certainly is the view of the eminent
Israeli historian Tom Segev, who argued in the wake of the
government's adoption of the bill: "In practice, the proposed law is
liable to turn all Arabs into conditional citizens, after they have
already become, in many respects, second-class citizens. Any attempt
to formulate an alternative to the Zionist reality is liable to be
interpreted as a 'breach of faith' and a pretext for stripping them of
their citizenship."

But it is unlikely to end there. I hesitate to make another prediction
but, given the rapidity with which the others have been realized, it
may be time to hazard yet another guess about where Israel is going
next.

The other day I was at a checkpoint near Nablus, one of several that
are being converted by Israel into what look suspiciously like
international border crossings, even though they fall deep inside
Palestinian territory.

I had heard that Palestinian citizens of Israel were being allowed to
pass these checkpoints unhindered to enter cities like Nablus to see
relatives. (These familial connections are a legacy of the 1948 war,
when separated Palestinian refugees ended up on different sides of the
Green Line, and also of marriages that were possible after 1967, when
Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza, making social and business
contacts possible again.) But, when Palestinian citizens try to leave
these cities via the checkpoints, they are invariably detained and
issued letters by the Israeli authorities warning them that they will
be tried if caught again visiting "enemy" areas.

In April last year, at a cabinet meeting at which the Israeli
government agreed to expel Hamas MPs from Jerusalem to the West Bank,
ministers discussed changing the classification of the Palestinian
Authority from a "hostile entity" to the harsher category of an "enemy
entity." The move was rejected for the time being because, as one
official told the Israeli media: "There are international legal
implications in such a declaration, including closing off the border
crossings, that we don't want to do yet."

Is it too much to suspect that before long, after Israel has completed
the West Bank wall and its "border" terminals, the Jewish state will
classify visits by Palestinian citizens to relatives as "visiting an
enemy state"? And will such visits be grounds for revoking
citizenship, as they could be under Erdan's bill if Palestinian
citizens visit relatives in Syria or Lebanon?

Lieberman doubtless knows the answer already.

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