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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 – those who currently enjoy
Israeli citizenship and those who live as oppressed subjects of Israel's
occupation – 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 - at least demographically - 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 - whether in the occupied territories or inside Israel - 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 right-wing
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 & the international comm., 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 about
2/3'rds 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% 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% 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 is frightened of them. Richard Kupermintz of Haifa Univ.,
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 1 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 - from his coalition partners in Kadima and in Lieberman's
Yisrael Beitenu, and from within his own party 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 & 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 – 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 who have been classified by the Govt. as "squatters" on state
lands are a regular occurrence, 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" - 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 the most outrageous racist
statements against Palestinian citizens, mostly unchallenged. Former
cabinet minister Effi Eitam, for example, said 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 unrepentant, 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 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
those visiting neighboring states, which is why the pressure is being
ramped up.
If Erdan's bill becomes law – which seems possible with
govt. backing – 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 govt. 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
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