19 sept 2017
Without citizenship, Bedouins would be largely defenseless against steps to evict them, advocates say.
Israel has quietly revoked the citizenship of thousands of members of its large Palestinian minority in recent years, highlighting that decades of demographic war against Palestinians are far from over.
The policy, which only recently came to light, is being implemented by Israel’s population registry, a department of the interior ministry. The registry has been regularly criticized for secrecy about its rules for determining residency and citizenship.
According to government data, some 2,600 Palestinian Bedouins are likely to have had their Israeli citizenship voided. Officials, however, have conceded that the figure may be much higher.
The future offspring of those stripped of citizenship are likely to suffer problems gaining citizenship too.
Human rights groups have severely criticized Israel for violating its own laws, as well as international conventions to which it is a party, in carrying out such revocations.
Sawsan Zaher, a lawyer with Adalah, a legal center for Israel’s Palestinian minority, told The Jerusalem Post newspaper: “This policy is illegal and in contravention to international law because you cannot leave someone stateless.”
Palestinian citizens, one in five of Israel’s population, are descended from Palestinians who survived a mass ethnic cleansing campaign waged during Israel’s creation in 1948.
Today, some 200,000 Bedouins live in Israel, most of them in a semi-desert area known as the Naqab.
One of the two fastest-growing [PDF] groups in Israel’s population, the Bedouins have faced especially harsh treatment. Israel continued expelling them to Jordan, Egypt and Gaza through the 1950s and to this day tightly limits the areas in the Naqab where the Bedouins can live.
Revelations of the revocations emerged as Ayelet Shaked, the far-right justice minister, warned Israel’s judges to prioritize demographic concerns and maintenance of the state’s Jewishness over human rights. She called growing numbers of non-Jews in the state “national challenges” that risked turning a Jewish state into “an empty symbol.”
According to Adalah, Bedouins typically learn that they have been stripped of citizenship when they approach the interior ministry for routine services such as renewing an identity card or passport, obtaining a birth certificate, or declaring a change of address.
Some have discovered their loss of status when seeking a passport to go on pilgrimage to Mecca, one of the obligations for Muslims.
Tip of the iceberg?
ida Touma-Sliman, a Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament, said the policy of revocations had intensified over the past 18 months.
“I’m afraid that what has been exposed is only the tip of the iceberg and what hasn’t been revealed yet is even more serious,” she told the Haaretz newspaper.
The legislator fears that many other Bedouins have been stripped of citizenship, but have yet to learn of the fact.
She said she believed that the government was in part targeting Bedouins with revocation of citizenship to weaken long-standing land claims against the state.
Tens of thousands of Bedouins have been mired [PDF] in legal action for decades trying to claim back the title deeds to ancestral lands seized from them by military officials in the first years after Israel’s creation.
Israel has declared the surviving communities as “unrecognized,” effectively criminalizing their inhabitants and denying them basic services such as water and electricity. Officials have also been trying to revive the Prawer Plan, which seeks to evict some 40,000 Bedouins – Adalah puts the figure at 80,000-90,000 – and force them into poor “townships.” The original plan was ostensibly frozen in late 2013 after mass protests across the Naqab.
Touma-Sliman said that without citizenship, Bedouins would be largely defenseless against steps to evict them.
Endless foot-dragging
Mahmoud al-Gharibi, an unemployed carpenter from the al-Azazme tribe, was one of several Bedouins who spoke to Haaretz in August during a protest rally in the Naqab village of Bir Hadaj.
He was told his citizenship had been revoked when he applied for a new identity card in 2000. “Since then I’ve applied 10 times [for renewed citizenship], getting 10 rejections, each time on a different pretext,” he said. “I have two children who are over 18 and they too have no citizenship.”
Another Bedouin who spoke anonymously to Haaretz said: “No one explains anything and all of a sudden your status changes. You go in as a citizen and come out deprived of citizenship, and then an endless process of foot-dragging begins.”
Zaher pointed out that many of those recently stripped of citizenship had been voting in parliamentary elections for years, even though it is a right available solely to citizens.
Adalah has warned that revoking citizenship is not only illegal according to Israel’s own laws, but violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, and the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, which Israel signed in 1961.
The group has appealed to Israel’s interior ministry and attorney general, demanding that they cancel the policy. Israeli officials have justified the revocations on the grounds that bureaucratic errors made in the state’s early years meant that the affected Bedouin’s parents or grandparents were not properly registered.
Israel did not pass its Citizenship Law – governing citizenship for non-Jews – until 1952. The legislation’s primary purpose was to strip some 750,000 Palestinians who had been made refugees by the 1948 war, and their millions of descendants, of a right to live in Israel.
A separate law, the 1950 Law of Return, entitles all Jews around the world to instant Israeli citizenship.
Martial law
The failure to register many Bedouins in Israel is related to a draconian period of martial law imposed on the Palestinian minority during Israel’s first 18 years.
Bedouins, like other Palestinian citizens, were not allowed to leave their communities without a special permit. But the remoteness of their communities and Israel’s continuing efforts to expel them through the 1950s mean that officials may have preferred to avoid registration in many cases.
According to reports by the United Nations and others, thousands of Bedouins were secretly expelled [PDF] into neighboring Egypt and Jordan during the early years of the military government.
Even those who were not expelled outside Israel were often evicted from their ancestral lands and forced into overcrowded “townships.”
This intentionally murky period in Israel’s history has made it hard for the Bedouins to prove many decades later what happened to their parents or grandparents.
Adalah’s Zaher told The Jerusalem Post: “Basically, we’re talking about the grandparents of the people who are now affected and don’t know what happened under military rule. And then suddenly in 2010 they were told that because their grandparents were granted citizenship by mistake, now they will be stripped of their citizenship.”
The interior ministry has downgraded those Bedouins stripped of citizenship to “permanent residents” – the same status accorded to Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem.
However, in practice, Israel does not treat “permanent residency” as permanent. Figures show that Israel has voided the residency status of nearly 15,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem since the city’s occupation began in 1967.
Treated as foreigners
Bedouins have been told they are eligible to apply for citizenship again through a naturalization process, treating them effectively as foreigners.
However, according to Adalah, many have found that when they apply they continue to be denied citizenship, often on grounds that documents cannot be located or they lack sufficient proficiency in Hebrew.
There is no Hebrew language test for foreigners seeking citizenship, either Jews immigrating under the Law of Return, or non-Jewish spouses of Israeli citizens naturalizing under the Citizenship Law.
According to Haaretz, other Bedouins have found the interior ministry so unresponsive they have given up in despair.
The only provision allowing citizenship to be canceled is for recent arrivals who provided false information in their applications. Even then, the interior ministry was required to act within three years – otherwise it had to make an application for revocation through the courts.
Adalah has complained that those affected were not given a hearing before their citizenship was rescinded or the chance to appeal. Zaher said the policy was also blatantly discriminatory as no Jews had been denied citizenship because of errors in their parents’ or grandparents’ registration under the Law of Return.
Equal rights for equal burden?
The treatment of Bedouins gives the lie to one of Israel’s most familiar claims: that Palestinian citizens will receive the same rights as Jewish citizens if they share an equal burden. Avigdor Lieberman, the defense minister, has repeatedly campaigned on a platform of “no loyalty, no citizenship.” He argues that Palestinian citizens who do not serve in the Israeli army or perform an equivalent form of national service should lose their citizenship.
However, a proportion of those stripped of citizenship are from Bedouin families that have served in the Israeli army as desert trackers.
Several unrecognized villages, home to some 100,000 Bedouins, have a tradition of military service, but have still been denied services. Their homes are all under threat of demolition.
Some of the residents of Umm al-Hiran, which is currently being demolished to make way for the exclusively new Jewish community of Hiran, served as trackers for the Israeli army.
Atalla Saghaira, a resident of the unrecognized village of Rahma, told Haaretz he had been stripped of his citizenship in 2002 when he applied for a passport, even though his father was a tracker for the Israeli army. After 13 years of struggle, he eventually managed to regain citizenship, but three of his brothers were still stateless.
No harm intended?
The Israeli parliament’s interior committee held a meeting last year at which officials for the first time gave details of the revocation policy.
The head of the interior ministry’s citizenship department, Ronen Yerushalmi, submitted a report stating that as many as 2,600 Bedouins were affected. He admitted, however, that the data was not precise and the figure could be even higher.
At another meeting, the committee’s legal adviser, Gilad Keren, warned that the ministry was most likely breaking Israeli law. He said he could not “understand how, when a person has been a citizen for 20 years and the state makes a mistake, that person’s status is changed.”
In a statement to The Jerusalem Post, the interior ministry denied the evidence heard by the committee, claiming that only about 150 people had been affected. “No one means to harm them,” a spokesperson said. “Now the ministry is asking them to legally re-register so they will remain citizens.”
Revelations of the mass revocations came as an Israeli court last month approved for the first time stripping of citizenship a Palestinian convicted of carrying out an attack.
The interior ministry gave Alaa Zayoud, from the town of Umm al-Fahm in present-day northern Israel, the status of temporary resident after he was sentenced to 25 years for carrying out a car-ramming attack last October on Israeli soldiers. Four people were injured in that incident.
The revocation was made on the basis of a 2008 amendment to the Citizenship Law that allows citizenship to be rescinded for “breach of loyalty” to the state.
Adalah, which opposed the government’s decision, pointed out a double standard in not applying the amendment to Israeli Jews. It cited recent cases such as that of a Jewish man and two Jewish juveniles who burned alive a 16-year-old Palestinian, Muhammad Abu Khudair, in Jerusalem in 2014, and that of Jewish settlers behind an arson attack a year later that killed three members of the Dawabsha family in the occupied West Bank village of Duma. None had citizenship revoked.
In 1996, Israel’s high court also refused a request to rescind the citizenship of an Israeli Jew, Yigal Amir, who a year earlier had assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, then prime minister. The judges ruled that such offenses should be dealt with in the criminal courts, not by revoking citizenship.
Previous revocations, though rare, have solely targeted Palestinian citizens. In 2002, Eli Yishai, then interior minister, stripped Nahad Abu Kishaq and Kais Obeid of citizenship.
Zayoud’s case was different because the interior ministry needed to seek court approval, therefore setting what Adalah and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel have called a “dangerous precedent.”
The fear is that Israel will use the case to justify many more such revocations or condition citizenship for the Palestinian minority on loyalty.
Ethnic cleansing
The question of whether Palestinians should have been awarded citizenship in the state’s early years is one that has exercised the Israeli leadership for decades. Many have feared that a growing Palestinian population in Israel poses a “demographic threat” to the state’s Jewishness.
Writing in 2002, Israeli historian Benny Morris suggested that Israel’s founding father, David Ben Gurion, should have “gone the whole hog” in 1948 – ethnically cleansing all Palestinians from the newly founded state of Israel.
Research has shown that Ben Gurion gave citizenship only reluctantly to the 150,000 Palestinians who survived the mass expulsions. They were initially assigned residency, chiefly as a way to aid in identifying and expelling Palestinian refugees trying to cross back into the new state of Israel to reach their villages.
Only in 1952, under international pressure, did Israel award the Palestinian minority citizenship through the Citizenship Law, legislation separate from that for Jews.
However, scholars have noted that for more than a decade Israeli leaders repeatedly attempted to find ways to expel Palestinian citizens or establish incentive schemes to encourage them to leave.
Israeli scholar Uri Davis has noted that 30,000 Palestinians living in Israel remained stateless until 1980, when Israel passed an amendment to the Citizenship Law belatedly awarding them citizenship.
Ben Gurion himself hoped to fix the percentage of Palestinians in Israel at no higher than 15 percent of the population. But with the proportion of Palestinian citizens now at one in five, Israeli politicians have been seeking ever more desperate ways to rid Israel of sections of the minority.
In July, the office of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, was reported to have urged the Trump administration in the US to agree to a land swap that would move an area home to some 250,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel to Palestinian control.
The proposal echoed Avigdor Lieberman’s long-standing plan to redraw Israel’s internationally recognized borders as a way to deny hundreds of thousands of Palestinians their citizenship.
In early 2014, the Maariv newspaper reported that Netanyahu had first posited a land and population exchange as a quick fix to reduce Palestinian citizens to no more than 12 percent of the population.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilizations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). Website: jonathan-cook.net
Israel has quietly revoked the citizenship of thousands of members of its large Palestinian minority in recent years, highlighting that decades of demographic war against Palestinians are far from over.
The policy, which only recently came to light, is being implemented by Israel’s population registry, a department of the interior ministry. The registry has been regularly criticized for secrecy about its rules for determining residency and citizenship.
According to government data, some 2,600 Palestinian Bedouins are likely to have had their Israeli citizenship voided. Officials, however, have conceded that the figure may be much higher.
The future offspring of those stripped of citizenship are likely to suffer problems gaining citizenship too.
Human rights groups have severely criticized Israel for violating its own laws, as well as international conventions to which it is a party, in carrying out such revocations.
Sawsan Zaher, a lawyer with Adalah, a legal center for Israel’s Palestinian minority, told The Jerusalem Post newspaper: “This policy is illegal and in contravention to international law because you cannot leave someone stateless.”
Palestinian citizens, one in five of Israel’s population, are descended from Palestinians who survived a mass ethnic cleansing campaign waged during Israel’s creation in 1948.
Today, some 200,000 Bedouins live in Israel, most of them in a semi-desert area known as the Naqab.
One of the two fastest-growing [PDF] groups in Israel’s population, the Bedouins have faced especially harsh treatment. Israel continued expelling them to Jordan, Egypt and Gaza through the 1950s and to this day tightly limits the areas in the Naqab where the Bedouins can live.
Revelations of the revocations emerged as Ayelet Shaked, the far-right justice minister, warned Israel’s judges to prioritize demographic concerns and maintenance of the state’s Jewishness over human rights. She called growing numbers of non-Jews in the state “national challenges” that risked turning a Jewish state into “an empty symbol.”
According to Adalah, Bedouins typically learn that they have been stripped of citizenship when they approach the interior ministry for routine services such as renewing an identity card or passport, obtaining a birth certificate, or declaring a change of address.
Some have discovered their loss of status when seeking a passport to go on pilgrimage to Mecca, one of the obligations for Muslims.
Tip of the iceberg?
ida Touma-Sliman, a Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament, said the policy of revocations had intensified over the past 18 months.
“I’m afraid that what has been exposed is only the tip of the iceberg and what hasn’t been revealed yet is even more serious,” she told the Haaretz newspaper.
The legislator fears that many other Bedouins have been stripped of citizenship, but have yet to learn of the fact.
She said she believed that the government was in part targeting Bedouins with revocation of citizenship to weaken long-standing land claims against the state.
Tens of thousands of Bedouins have been mired [PDF] in legal action for decades trying to claim back the title deeds to ancestral lands seized from them by military officials in the first years after Israel’s creation.
Israel has declared the surviving communities as “unrecognized,” effectively criminalizing their inhabitants and denying them basic services such as water and electricity. Officials have also been trying to revive the Prawer Plan, which seeks to evict some 40,000 Bedouins – Adalah puts the figure at 80,000-90,000 – and force them into poor “townships.” The original plan was ostensibly frozen in late 2013 after mass protests across the Naqab.
Touma-Sliman said that without citizenship, Bedouins would be largely defenseless against steps to evict them.
Endless foot-dragging
Mahmoud al-Gharibi, an unemployed carpenter from the al-Azazme tribe, was one of several Bedouins who spoke to Haaretz in August during a protest rally in the Naqab village of Bir Hadaj.
He was told his citizenship had been revoked when he applied for a new identity card in 2000. “Since then I’ve applied 10 times [for renewed citizenship], getting 10 rejections, each time on a different pretext,” he said. “I have two children who are over 18 and they too have no citizenship.”
Another Bedouin who spoke anonymously to Haaretz said: “No one explains anything and all of a sudden your status changes. You go in as a citizen and come out deprived of citizenship, and then an endless process of foot-dragging begins.”
Zaher pointed out that many of those recently stripped of citizenship had been voting in parliamentary elections for years, even though it is a right available solely to citizens.
Adalah has warned that revoking citizenship is not only illegal according to Israel’s own laws, but violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, and the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, which Israel signed in 1961.
The group has appealed to Israel’s interior ministry and attorney general, demanding that they cancel the policy. Israeli officials have justified the revocations on the grounds that bureaucratic errors made in the state’s early years meant that the affected Bedouin’s parents or grandparents were not properly registered.
Israel did not pass its Citizenship Law – governing citizenship for non-Jews – until 1952. The legislation’s primary purpose was to strip some 750,000 Palestinians who had been made refugees by the 1948 war, and their millions of descendants, of a right to live in Israel.
A separate law, the 1950 Law of Return, entitles all Jews around the world to instant Israeli citizenship.
Martial law
The failure to register many Bedouins in Israel is related to a draconian period of martial law imposed on the Palestinian minority during Israel’s first 18 years.
Bedouins, like other Palestinian citizens, were not allowed to leave their communities without a special permit. But the remoteness of their communities and Israel’s continuing efforts to expel them through the 1950s mean that officials may have preferred to avoid registration in many cases.
According to reports by the United Nations and others, thousands of Bedouins were secretly expelled [PDF] into neighboring Egypt and Jordan during the early years of the military government.
Even those who were not expelled outside Israel were often evicted from their ancestral lands and forced into overcrowded “townships.”
This intentionally murky period in Israel’s history has made it hard for the Bedouins to prove many decades later what happened to their parents or grandparents.
Adalah’s Zaher told The Jerusalem Post: “Basically, we’re talking about the grandparents of the people who are now affected and don’t know what happened under military rule. And then suddenly in 2010 they were told that because their grandparents were granted citizenship by mistake, now they will be stripped of their citizenship.”
The interior ministry has downgraded those Bedouins stripped of citizenship to “permanent residents” – the same status accorded to Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem.
However, in practice, Israel does not treat “permanent residency” as permanent. Figures show that Israel has voided the residency status of nearly 15,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem since the city’s occupation began in 1967.
Treated as foreigners
Bedouins have been told they are eligible to apply for citizenship again through a naturalization process, treating them effectively as foreigners.
However, according to Adalah, many have found that when they apply they continue to be denied citizenship, often on grounds that documents cannot be located or they lack sufficient proficiency in Hebrew.
There is no Hebrew language test for foreigners seeking citizenship, either Jews immigrating under the Law of Return, or non-Jewish spouses of Israeli citizens naturalizing under the Citizenship Law.
According to Haaretz, other Bedouins have found the interior ministry so unresponsive they have given up in despair.
The only provision allowing citizenship to be canceled is for recent arrivals who provided false information in their applications. Even then, the interior ministry was required to act within three years – otherwise it had to make an application for revocation through the courts.
Adalah has complained that those affected were not given a hearing before their citizenship was rescinded or the chance to appeal. Zaher said the policy was also blatantly discriminatory as no Jews had been denied citizenship because of errors in their parents’ or grandparents’ registration under the Law of Return.
Equal rights for equal burden?
The treatment of Bedouins gives the lie to one of Israel’s most familiar claims: that Palestinian citizens will receive the same rights as Jewish citizens if they share an equal burden. Avigdor Lieberman, the defense minister, has repeatedly campaigned on a platform of “no loyalty, no citizenship.” He argues that Palestinian citizens who do not serve in the Israeli army or perform an equivalent form of national service should lose their citizenship.
However, a proportion of those stripped of citizenship are from Bedouin families that have served in the Israeli army as desert trackers.
Several unrecognized villages, home to some 100,000 Bedouins, have a tradition of military service, but have still been denied services. Their homes are all under threat of demolition.
Some of the residents of Umm al-Hiran, which is currently being demolished to make way for the exclusively new Jewish community of Hiran, served as trackers for the Israeli army.
Atalla Saghaira, a resident of the unrecognized village of Rahma, told Haaretz he had been stripped of his citizenship in 2002 when he applied for a passport, even though his father was a tracker for the Israeli army. After 13 years of struggle, he eventually managed to regain citizenship, but three of his brothers were still stateless.
No harm intended?
The Israeli parliament’s interior committee held a meeting last year at which officials for the first time gave details of the revocation policy.
The head of the interior ministry’s citizenship department, Ronen Yerushalmi, submitted a report stating that as many as 2,600 Bedouins were affected. He admitted, however, that the data was not precise and the figure could be even higher.
At another meeting, the committee’s legal adviser, Gilad Keren, warned that the ministry was most likely breaking Israeli law. He said he could not “understand how, when a person has been a citizen for 20 years and the state makes a mistake, that person’s status is changed.”
In a statement to The Jerusalem Post, the interior ministry denied the evidence heard by the committee, claiming that only about 150 people had been affected. “No one means to harm them,” a spokesperson said. “Now the ministry is asking them to legally re-register so they will remain citizens.”
Revelations of the mass revocations came as an Israeli court last month approved for the first time stripping of citizenship a Palestinian convicted of carrying out an attack.
The interior ministry gave Alaa Zayoud, from the town of Umm al-Fahm in present-day northern Israel, the status of temporary resident after he was sentenced to 25 years for carrying out a car-ramming attack last October on Israeli soldiers. Four people were injured in that incident.
The revocation was made on the basis of a 2008 amendment to the Citizenship Law that allows citizenship to be rescinded for “breach of loyalty” to the state.
Adalah, which opposed the government’s decision, pointed out a double standard in not applying the amendment to Israeli Jews. It cited recent cases such as that of a Jewish man and two Jewish juveniles who burned alive a 16-year-old Palestinian, Muhammad Abu Khudair, in Jerusalem in 2014, and that of Jewish settlers behind an arson attack a year later that killed three members of the Dawabsha family in the occupied West Bank village of Duma. None had citizenship revoked.
In 1996, Israel’s high court also refused a request to rescind the citizenship of an Israeli Jew, Yigal Amir, who a year earlier had assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, then prime minister. The judges ruled that such offenses should be dealt with in the criminal courts, not by revoking citizenship.
Previous revocations, though rare, have solely targeted Palestinian citizens. In 2002, Eli Yishai, then interior minister, stripped Nahad Abu Kishaq and Kais Obeid of citizenship.
Zayoud’s case was different because the interior ministry needed to seek court approval, therefore setting what Adalah and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel have called a “dangerous precedent.”
The fear is that Israel will use the case to justify many more such revocations or condition citizenship for the Palestinian minority on loyalty.
Ethnic cleansing
The question of whether Palestinians should have been awarded citizenship in the state’s early years is one that has exercised the Israeli leadership for decades. Many have feared that a growing Palestinian population in Israel poses a “demographic threat” to the state’s Jewishness.
Writing in 2002, Israeli historian Benny Morris suggested that Israel’s founding father, David Ben Gurion, should have “gone the whole hog” in 1948 – ethnically cleansing all Palestinians from the newly founded state of Israel.
Research has shown that Ben Gurion gave citizenship only reluctantly to the 150,000 Palestinians who survived the mass expulsions. They were initially assigned residency, chiefly as a way to aid in identifying and expelling Palestinian refugees trying to cross back into the new state of Israel to reach their villages.
Only in 1952, under international pressure, did Israel award the Palestinian minority citizenship through the Citizenship Law, legislation separate from that for Jews.
However, scholars have noted that for more than a decade Israeli leaders repeatedly attempted to find ways to expel Palestinian citizens or establish incentive schemes to encourage them to leave.
Israeli scholar Uri Davis has noted that 30,000 Palestinians living in Israel remained stateless until 1980, when Israel passed an amendment to the Citizenship Law belatedly awarding them citizenship.
Ben Gurion himself hoped to fix the percentage of Palestinians in Israel at no higher than 15 percent of the population. But with the proportion of Palestinian citizens now at one in five, Israeli politicians have been seeking ever more desperate ways to rid Israel of sections of the minority.
In July, the office of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, was reported to have urged the Trump administration in the US to agree to a land swap that would move an area home to some 250,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel to Palestinian control.
The proposal echoed Avigdor Lieberman’s long-standing plan to redraw Israel’s internationally recognized borders as a way to deny hundreds of thousands of Palestinians their citizenship.
In early 2014, the Maariv newspaper reported that Netanyahu had first posited a land and population exchange as a quick fix to reduce Palestinian citizens to no more than 12 percent of the population.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilizations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). Website: jonathan-cook.net
The Israeli authorities finalized on Tuesday the emptying of an ammonia tank in Haifa bay deemed the most lethal in the Middle East.
According to The Times of Israel daily, the Haifa Court for Local Affairs ruled by the end of July 2017 that an ammonia tank that the city council has fought to remove over concerns that it threatens the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in the area must be emptied by mid September.
MK Yair Lapid, who heads the opposition Yesh Atid party, praised the court’s ruling, saying in a statement that it was important “for the safety of the residents of Haifa and the area.”
It is time “to remove the greatest bomb in the Middle East from Haifa Bay,” he added.
The Haifa Group, a fertilizer producer that operates the tank, said in a statement following the ruling that “the company will respect the court’s decision.”
It wasn’t immediately clear how much ammonia the 12,000-ton-capacity tank currently contains.
Haifa Mayor Yona Yahav hailed the decision, calling it “an additional accomplishment in the year-long struggle, which we will not stop until the storage tank is removed from Haifa Bay.”
The Haifa municipality submitted its petition for the closure of the ammonium storage facility following the publication two weeks ago of a report it commissioned that found the port city’s ammonia operations pose a serious risk to the population.
The report was also submitted to the High Court of Justice as part of a legal dispute between Haifa Group and the municipality.
If ruptured, the vast ammonia storage tank would suffocate 16,000 victims under a toxic cloud, the report said.
But an even worse danger, the report said, is posed by a delivery ship carrying over 16,000 tons of ammonia that arrives at the Haifa container once a month. If its cargo were released to the air, it could kill as many as 600,000 in the bay area, according to the report.
According to The Times of Israel daily, the Haifa Court for Local Affairs ruled by the end of July 2017 that an ammonia tank that the city council has fought to remove over concerns that it threatens the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in the area must be emptied by mid September.
MK Yair Lapid, who heads the opposition Yesh Atid party, praised the court’s ruling, saying in a statement that it was important “for the safety of the residents of Haifa and the area.”
It is time “to remove the greatest bomb in the Middle East from Haifa Bay,” he added.
The Haifa Group, a fertilizer producer that operates the tank, said in a statement following the ruling that “the company will respect the court’s decision.”
It wasn’t immediately clear how much ammonia the 12,000-ton-capacity tank currently contains.
Haifa Mayor Yona Yahav hailed the decision, calling it “an additional accomplishment in the year-long struggle, which we will not stop until the storage tank is removed from Haifa Bay.”
The Haifa municipality submitted its petition for the closure of the ammonium storage facility following the publication two weeks ago of a report it commissioned that found the port city’s ammonia operations pose a serious risk to the population.
The report was also submitted to the High Court of Justice as part of a legal dispute between Haifa Group and the municipality.
If ruptured, the vast ammonia storage tank would suffocate 16,000 victims under a toxic cloud, the report said.
But an even worse danger, the report said, is posed by a delivery ship carrying over 16,000 tons of ammonia that arrives at the Haifa container once a month. If its cargo were released to the air, it could kill as many as 600,000 in the bay area, according to the report.
There is a great irony in the fact that Israel is seeking a seat at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC).
Since its establishment atop the ruins of Palestinian cities and villages in 1948, Israel has had the most precarious relationship with the world’s largest international body.
It has desperately sought to be legitimized by the UN, while it has done its utmost to delegitimize the UN.
Following a resolution at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) condemning Israel’s human rights abuses in the Occupied Palestinian Territory in March 2014, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, then accused the UN of being ‘absurd’. He vowed to “continue to denounce and expose” the UN “procession of hypocrisy.”
For many years, Israeli leaders and government officials have made it a habit of undermining the UN and its various bodies and, with unconditional support from Washington, habitually ignored numerous UN resolutions regarding the illegal occupation of Palestine.
To a certain extent, the Israeli strategy – of using and abusing the UN – has worked. With US vetoes, blocking every UN attempt at pressuring Israel to end its military occupation and human rights violations, Israel was in no rush to comply with international law.
But two major events have forced an Israeli rethink.
Read More: Bennett: Jordan Valley is ‘inseparable part’ of Israel
First, in December 2016, the US abstained from a UN resolution that condemned Israel’s illegal settlement activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
By breaking with a decades-long tradition of shielding Israel from any international censure, it appeared that even Washington’s seemingly undying allegiance to Tel Aviv was uncertain.
Second, the rise of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement began changing the dynamics of international politics regarding the Israeli occupation.
The movement, which began as a call by Palestinian civil society to hold Israel accountable for its violations of Palestinian human rights, grew rapidly to become a global movement. Hundreds of local BDS groups multiplied around the world, joined by artists, academicians, union members and elected politicians.
Within a few years, BDS has registered as a serious tool of pressure used to denounce the Israeli occupation and demand justice for the Palestinian people.
UNHRC quickly joined in, declaring its intention to release a list, thus exposing the names of companies that must be boycotted for operating in illegal Israeli settlements.
The human rights group’s efforts were coupled by repeated condemnations of Israel’s human rights violations as recorded by the UN cultural agency, UNESCO.
This meant that UN bodies that do not allow for veto-wielding members grew in their ability to challenge the UN Security Council.
The actions of UNHRC and UNESCO spurred a determined Israeli-American campaign to delegitimize them.
Since the Donald Trump Administration’s advent to power, and with the help of his ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, Washington has waged a war against the UN, using intimidation and the threats of withholding funds.
Read More:Al-Aqsa Mufti: Teaching Israel’s syllabus is ‘haram’
UNESCO insisted on its position, despite the cutting off of funds. Meanwhile, UNHRC decided to go along with publishing the list of companies, despite US threats to pull out of the human rights body altogether.
According to Israel’s Channel 2, the list includes Coca-Cola, TripAdvisor, Airbnb, Priceline and Caterpillar. It also includes national Israeli companies and two large banks.
Israeli officials fumed. Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely charged that “The UN is playing with fire”, threatening that such initiative will cause further loss of UN budget.
She even declared that the US and Israel are working together to start a ‘revolution’ at the Human Rights Council through a joint ‘action plan.’
Signs of this oddly termed ‘revolution’ are already apparent. Aside from choking off UN bodies financially, Israel is lobbying countries in the South that have traditionally exhibited solidarity with Palestinians due to the common historical bonds of foreign oppression and anti-colonial struggles.
Netanyahu had just concluded a trip to Latin America, considered the first by a sitting Israeli Prime Minister. In the last leg of his trip in Mexico, he offered to ‘develop Central America.’
The price is, of course, for Latin American countries to support Israel’s occupation of Palestine and turn a blind eye to its human rights violations in Palestine.
The irony that, fortunately, did not escape everyone is that last January, Netanyahu declared his support of Trump’s promise to wall off the US-Mexico border and force Mexico to pay for it.
It remains to be seen how Israel’s efforts will win Latin America to Israel’s side, considering the latter’s terrible record of supporting fascist regimes and subverting democracy.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s charm offensive was planned to include Togo in October to attend the Israel-Africa Summit. Thanks to the efforts of South Africa, Morocco, among other countries, the summit was cancelled due to the fact that over half of African countries were planning to boycott it.
The setback must have been a major diplomatic embarrassment for Tel Aviv as Netanyahu has made African diplomacy a pillar in his foreign policy. Last June, he visited Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Rwanda. He was accompanied by a large delegation of business executives. Earlier in June, he promised African leaders at the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) summit in Liberia to supply them with agricultural technology that would stave off droughts and food scarcity.
The price? According to African News Agency (ANA), “Israeli technology would solve Africa’s most urgent issues – as long as African nations opposed UN resolutions critical of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.”
Read More: Ignore the spin, the siege of Gaza endangers everyone, Israelis included, so end it now
Not all African leaders allowed themselves to be manipulated by Tel Aviv.
But the Israeli tactic is certainly becoming more defined and emboldened. Tel Aviv’s aim is to undercut the support of Palestinians at the UN General Assembly, and sabotage the work of UN bodies that exist outside the realm of US power.
Meanwhile, it also wants to secure a seat for itself at the UN Security Council. The assumption is that, with the support of Haley at the UN, such a possibility is not far-fetched.
In addition to the five-permeant veto-wielding UN Security Council members, ten-member countries are elected on a two-year term basis.
Israel’s charm offensive in Latin America, Africa and Asia is meant to ensure the needed vote to grant it a seat in the 2019-2020 term.
The vote will take place next year, and Israel will stand against Germany and Belgium.
Israel’s strategy of elevating its status at the UN can also been seen as an admission of failure of Tel Aviv’s antagonistic behavior. However, if Israel wins that seat, it is likely to use the new position to strengthen its occupation of Palestine, as opposed to adhering to international law.
It is unfortunate that the Arabs and the Palestinian Authority are waking up to this reality quite late. Israel has been plotting for this moment for years – since 2005 under the premiership of Ariel Sharon – yet the PA is only now requesting an Arab League strategy to prevent Israel from reaching that influential position.
What Palestinians are counting on, at the moment, is the existing historical support that the Palestinian people have among many countries around the world, especially in the global South.
Most of these nations have experienced colonization, military occupation and had their own costly and painful liberation struggles.
They should not allow a colonialist regime to sit atop of the UN, obstructing international law while preaching to world about democracy and human rights.
Since its establishment atop the ruins of Palestinian cities and villages in 1948, Israel has had the most precarious relationship with the world’s largest international body.
It has desperately sought to be legitimized by the UN, while it has done its utmost to delegitimize the UN.
Following a resolution at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) condemning Israel’s human rights abuses in the Occupied Palestinian Territory in March 2014, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, then accused the UN of being ‘absurd’. He vowed to “continue to denounce and expose” the UN “procession of hypocrisy.”
For many years, Israeli leaders and government officials have made it a habit of undermining the UN and its various bodies and, with unconditional support from Washington, habitually ignored numerous UN resolutions regarding the illegal occupation of Palestine.
To a certain extent, the Israeli strategy – of using and abusing the UN – has worked. With US vetoes, blocking every UN attempt at pressuring Israel to end its military occupation and human rights violations, Israel was in no rush to comply with international law.
But two major events have forced an Israeli rethink.
Read More: Bennett: Jordan Valley is ‘inseparable part’ of Israel
First, in December 2016, the US abstained from a UN resolution that condemned Israel’s illegal settlement activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
By breaking with a decades-long tradition of shielding Israel from any international censure, it appeared that even Washington’s seemingly undying allegiance to Tel Aviv was uncertain.
Second, the rise of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement began changing the dynamics of international politics regarding the Israeli occupation.
The movement, which began as a call by Palestinian civil society to hold Israel accountable for its violations of Palestinian human rights, grew rapidly to become a global movement. Hundreds of local BDS groups multiplied around the world, joined by artists, academicians, union members and elected politicians.
Within a few years, BDS has registered as a serious tool of pressure used to denounce the Israeli occupation and demand justice for the Palestinian people.
UNHRC quickly joined in, declaring its intention to release a list, thus exposing the names of companies that must be boycotted for operating in illegal Israeli settlements.
The human rights group’s efforts were coupled by repeated condemnations of Israel’s human rights violations as recorded by the UN cultural agency, UNESCO.
This meant that UN bodies that do not allow for veto-wielding members grew in their ability to challenge the UN Security Council.
The actions of UNHRC and UNESCO spurred a determined Israeli-American campaign to delegitimize them.
Since the Donald Trump Administration’s advent to power, and with the help of his ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, Washington has waged a war against the UN, using intimidation and the threats of withholding funds.
Read More:Al-Aqsa Mufti: Teaching Israel’s syllabus is ‘haram’
UNESCO insisted on its position, despite the cutting off of funds. Meanwhile, UNHRC decided to go along with publishing the list of companies, despite US threats to pull out of the human rights body altogether.
According to Israel’s Channel 2, the list includes Coca-Cola, TripAdvisor, Airbnb, Priceline and Caterpillar. It also includes national Israeli companies and two large banks.
Israeli officials fumed. Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely charged that “The UN is playing with fire”, threatening that such initiative will cause further loss of UN budget.
She even declared that the US and Israel are working together to start a ‘revolution’ at the Human Rights Council through a joint ‘action plan.’
Signs of this oddly termed ‘revolution’ are already apparent. Aside from choking off UN bodies financially, Israel is lobbying countries in the South that have traditionally exhibited solidarity with Palestinians due to the common historical bonds of foreign oppression and anti-colonial struggles.
Netanyahu had just concluded a trip to Latin America, considered the first by a sitting Israeli Prime Minister. In the last leg of his trip in Mexico, he offered to ‘develop Central America.’
The price is, of course, for Latin American countries to support Israel’s occupation of Palestine and turn a blind eye to its human rights violations in Palestine.
The irony that, fortunately, did not escape everyone is that last January, Netanyahu declared his support of Trump’s promise to wall off the US-Mexico border and force Mexico to pay for it.
It remains to be seen how Israel’s efforts will win Latin America to Israel’s side, considering the latter’s terrible record of supporting fascist regimes and subverting democracy.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s charm offensive was planned to include Togo in October to attend the Israel-Africa Summit. Thanks to the efforts of South Africa, Morocco, among other countries, the summit was cancelled due to the fact that over half of African countries were planning to boycott it.
The setback must have been a major diplomatic embarrassment for Tel Aviv as Netanyahu has made African diplomacy a pillar in his foreign policy. Last June, he visited Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Rwanda. He was accompanied by a large delegation of business executives. Earlier in June, he promised African leaders at the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) summit in Liberia to supply them with agricultural technology that would stave off droughts and food scarcity.
The price? According to African News Agency (ANA), “Israeli technology would solve Africa’s most urgent issues – as long as African nations opposed UN resolutions critical of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.”
Read More: Ignore the spin, the siege of Gaza endangers everyone, Israelis included, so end it now
Not all African leaders allowed themselves to be manipulated by Tel Aviv.
But the Israeli tactic is certainly becoming more defined and emboldened. Tel Aviv’s aim is to undercut the support of Palestinians at the UN General Assembly, and sabotage the work of UN bodies that exist outside the realm of US power.
Meanwhile, it also wants to secure a seat for itself at the UN Security Council. The assumption is that, with the support of Haley at the UN, such a possibility is not far-fetched.
In addition to the five-permeant veto-wielding UN Security Council members, ten-member countries are elected on a two-year term basis.
Israel’s charm offensive in Latin America, Africa and Asia is meant to ensure the needed vote to grant it a seat in the 2019-2020 term.
The vote will take place next year, and Israel will stand against Germany and Belgium.
Israel’s strategy of elevating its status at the UN can also been seen as an admission of failure of Tel Aviv’s antagonistic behavior. However, if Israel wins that seat, it is likely to use the new position to strengthen its occupation of Palestine, as opposed to adhering to international law.
It is unfortunate that the Arabs and the Palestinian Authority are waking up to this reality quite late. Israel has been plotting for this moment for years – since 2005 under the premiership of Ariel Sharon – yet the PA is only now requesting an Arab League strategy to prevent Israel from reaching that influential position.
What Palestinians are counting on, at the moment, is the existing historical support that the Palestinian people have among many countries around the world, especially in the global South.
Most of these nations have experienced colonization, military occupation and had their own costly and painful liberation struggles.
They should not allow a colonialist regime to sit atop of the UN, obstructing international law while preaching to world about democracy and human rights.
15 sept 2017
The Moroccan Commission to Support the Nation’s Causes strongly condemned Thursday the projected participation of an Israeli singer at a jazz festival in the Moroccan city of Tangier.
The commission said in a statement the move comes at a time when Israeli aggressions, Judaization schemes, extrajudicial executions, and arbitrary detentions have reached a peak in the occupied Palestinian territories.
It added that the Israeli singer Noam Vazana has often boasted about her support for the Israeli occupation army.
The commission stressed its firm rebuff of all forms of normalization with the Israeli occupation be them cultural, academic, or political.
“The singer’s projected participation at the festival amounts to an attempt to whitewash the Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people and holy sites,” said the commission. “It is also a barefaced provocation of Moroccans’ pro-Palestine stance.”
The Israeli singer’s participation at the jazz festival in Tangier is stirring controversy in a country that is usually perceived as unfriendly to Israel.
Some locals have called for the cancellation of the upcoming performances of Noam Vazana, an Israeli-born vocalist, scheduled for Friday and Saturday at the Tanjazz Festival.
The commission said in a statement the move comes at a time when Israeli aggressions, Judaization schemes, extrajudicial executions, and arbitrary detentions have reached a peak in the occupied Palestinian territories.
It added that the Israeli singer Noam Vazana has often boasted about her support for the Israeli occupation army.
The commission stressed its firm rebuff of all forms of normalization with the Israeli occupation be them cultural, academic, or political.
“The singer’s projected participation at the festival amounts to an attempt to whitewash the Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people and holy sites,” said the commission. “It is also a barefaced provocation of Moroccans’ pro-Palestine stance.”
The Israeli singer’s participation at the jazz festival in Tangier is stirring controversy in a country that is usually perceived as unfriendly to Israel.
Some locals have called for the cancellation of the upcoming performances of Noam Vazana, an Israeli-born vocalist, scheduled for Friday and Saturday at the Tanjazz Festival.
13 sept 2017
By Emma Von Larsen and Bettina Boye/PNN
Various Israeli officials joined the IDC institute of Counterterrorism annual conference to discuss the development of terrorism and ways to counter, where Israeli minister of education, Naftali Bennett emphasized that “modern Zionism has created a safe haven for Jewish people, and Iran threatens this” and continued “I have no doubt that the nuclearization of Iran is the number one existential threat to the state of Israel”.
He claimed that an attack on Iran would not destroy the country, but an attack by Iran on Israel would, and that is a great threat for Israel.
Despite the lack of an actual war between Israel and Iran and Israel’s recent bombing of an alleged weapon factory in Syria, which could be seen as provoking and as an invitation to a proxy war with Iran, Bennett underlines, that the tension between the two countries is not a “Cold War”.
Bennett also argued that Israel’s own policy of disengagement is one of the greatest threats towards itself, and mentions as an example the 2005 disengagement from the conflict in Gaza, and that the consequences of Israel’s disengagement was the takeover of the Strip by Hamas.
As another example of Israel’s policy of disengagement, Bennett mentions the situation with Hezbollah, and states that, when the Israeli military retreaded from the position in Lebanon they indirectly allowed Hezbollah to blossom and to grow strength.
“I would like to state this emphatically: Lebanon is Hezbollah and Hezbollah is Lebanon. A ballistic attack on Israel would be the equivalent of a declaration of war by sovereign state of Lebanon,” he said.
Various Israeli officials joined the IDC institute of Counterterrorism annual conference to discuss the development of terrorism and ways to counter, where Israeli minister of education, Naftali Bennett emphasized that “modern Zionism has created a safe haven for Jewish people, and Iran threatens this” and continued “I have no doubt that the nuclearization of Iran is the number one existential threat to the state of Israel”.
He claimed that an attack on Iran would not destroy the country, but an attack by Iran on Israel would, and that is a great threat for Israel.
Despite the lack of an actual war between Israel and Iran and Israel’s recent bombing of an alleged weapon factory in Syria, which could be seen as provoking and as an invitation to a proxy war with Iran, Bennett underlines, that the tension between the two countries is not a “Cold War”.
Bennett also argued that Israel’s own policy of disengagement is one of the greatest threats towards itself, and mentions as an example the 2005 disengagement from the conflict in Gaza, and that the consequences of Israel’s disengagement was the takeover of the Strip by Hamas.
As another example of Israel’s policy of disengagement, Bennett mentions the situation with Hezbollah, and states that, when the Israeli military retreaded from the position in Lebanon they indirectly allowed Hezbollah to blossom and to grow strength.
“I would like to state this emphatically: Lebanon is Hezbollah and Hezbollah is Lebanon. A ballistic attack on Israel would be the equivalent of a declaration of war by sovereign state of Lebanon,” he said.
Three Israeli soldiers were injured on Wednesday during a training exercise at the occupied Golan Heights.
The soldiers suffered different injuries when a Merkava battle tank flipped during military exercises in Golan Heights.
The injured soldiers were immediately taken to hospital, while an investigation was opened into the incident.
Last week, an Israeli soldier was seriously injured when a smoke grenade exploded during a training exercise at the Shizafon base in the Negev.
The soldiers suffered different injuries when a Merkava battle tank flipped during military exercises in Golan Heights.
The injured soldiers were immediately taken to hospital, while an investigation was opened into the incident.
Last week, an Israeli soldier was seriously injured when a smoke grenade exploded during a training exercise at the Shizafon base in the Negev.