ethnic cleansing |

Dec 16

Gaza to Galilee: The colonial context

Framing events in Gaza in the colonial context is vital for understanding the nature of the violence, argues author.

While it is common knowledge that a majority of the population of the Gaza Strip are refugees, it is less well understood where they came from. The shocking reality is that many of the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip are a few miles away from the land of their ethnically cleansed former villages, across the border fence in southern Israel. Like so much else with Palestine, you can’t understand Gaza if you don’t understand the Nakba. Read more

Oct 22

Israel: Ethnic cleansing in the Negev

The forced relocation of Bedouins in southern Israel fits Foreign Affairs’ definition of ethnic cleansing.

In September 2011, Israel’s government approved a plan to forcibly relocate tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens in the Negev from their unrecognised villages to government-approved shanty towns. The Prawer Plan, as it is known, advanced again in March this year, when it was endorsed by a committee in the Prime Minister’s Office.

Around half of the Bedouin population in Israel live in 45 “unrecognised villages”, with a handful in the ”process of recognition” by the state (see Israeli NGO Adalah’s “Myths and Misconceptions“). The Israeli government wants to force them out, claiming that their “squatting” is taking over the Negev. In fact, while constituting 30 per cent of the region’s population, today Bedouin are claiming ”less than five per cent of the total area”. Read more

Sep 4

Be’er Sheva’s mosquerade

A wine and beer festival to be held in a former Great Mosque is an exemplar of contemporary Israeli history.

This week, the Israeli city of Be’er Sheva (Beer el-Sabe) will hold a wine and beer festival in the courtyard of the city’s former Great Mosque. The municipality’s plans have provoked anger from the country’s Palestinian citizens, including a legal challenge by minority rights group Adalah, as well as a protest tent and condemnation by community leaders and politicians.

This episode is a microcosm of Israel’s hidden history, a country where town and country alike is strewn with reminders of the ongoing ethnic cleansing at the heart of the establishment of a “Jewish and democratic” state. Read more

May 16

‘Jewish democracy’ founded on ugly battles

Israel has a Jewish majority today because of the expulsions and denationalisation of most Palestinians living there.

Among the many good reasons for marking the anniversary of the Nakba are two which speak to the intensifying debate about Israel’s “democratic values”: firstly, the fact that the Nakba is ongoing, in the daily acts of piecemeal ethnic cleansing from the Jordan Valley to the Negev, and secondly, the way in which the historical facts of “transfer” undermine the mythology of Israel as a supposed “Jewish and democratic” state. Read more

Mar 30

“Happy Palestine Land Day…” Guest editorial for Informed Comment

It has just come out that the Israeli military has earmarked ten percent of the land in the Occupied West bank for Israeli settlements. In addition, the Israeli government is moving forward with an outrageous plan that will mean the expulsion of tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens in the Negev desert. The context is the warning issued by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in a 2010 government meeting that a Negev “without a Jewish majority” would pose “a palpable threat”. Read more

Feb 5

Is Israel a democracy or an ethnocracy?

The Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) is one of the key Israel advocacy groups in the UK. In the last week BICOM has published a series of essays on ‘Israel’s democratic futures’ (if that’s a question, the answer is ‘here’s hoping’). BICOM’s worry, as its chief Lorna Fitzsimons wrote in her introduction, is that “a notion is spreading in the West that Israel is fast becoming an illiberal ethno-democracy”. Read more

Oct 12

Not Enough is Being said About the Inequality for Palestinians in Israel

In a Middle East country, a minority is threatened. Around 30,000 face forcible relocation by the government, while elected officials talk of the need to change ‘demographics’. Public racism is routine, and the nation’s security services are clear that they will subvert even nonviolent dissent.

This is Israel, although you wouldn’t know it from reading the article published this week by BICOM’s Alan Johnson. In order to argue that a recent attack on a mosque in northern Israel “says nothing” about “deeper trends in Jewish-Arab relations in Israel”, Johnson omits and distorts in a way that is unhelpful for understanding the reality of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Read more

May 15

Palestinian Nakba: Forever a memory

Palestinians around the world are marking the anniversary of the Nakba, the catastrophe that occurred when the state of Israel was established in 1948.

The scale of the devastation was overwhelming: four in five Palestinian villages inside the borders of the new state were ethnically cleansed, an act of mass dispossession accompanied by atrocities. Around 95 per cent of new Jewish communities built between 1948-1953 were established on the land of expelled, denationalised Palestinians.

Referring to these refugees, Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion famously said that “the old will die and the young will forget”. In fact, rather than “forgetting”, the Nakba has become one of the central foundations for activism by Palestinians – and their supporters – around the world. Read more