Capital Murder - Jerusalem's Final Status

Written by Ben White

http://pulsemedia.org/2010/01/26/capital-murder/

January 26, 2010 at 3:39 pm

First and foremost, united Jerusalem, which will include both Ma’ale Adumim and Givat Ze’ev — as the capital of Israel, under Israeli sovereignty…
– Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, on the vision for a “permanent solution”, 5 October 1995

Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Jewish people, a city reunified so as never again to be divided
– Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, 21 May 2009

The current consensus in the international community is that East Jerusalem, occupied by Israel since 1967, is the capital of a future Palestinian state. Israel’s unilateral annexation of territory to create expanded municipal boundaries for a ‘reunited’ Jerusalem was never recognised.

Over the last forty-three years, Israel has created so-called ‘facts on the ground’ in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), in defiance of international law. Since the Madrid/Oslo peace process, successive Israeli governments have continued to colonise Palestinian land at the same time as conducting negotiations.

The extent and scale of Israel’s illegal settlement project across the West Bank, as well as the road network, the Separation Wall, and other ways in which Israel maintains its rule over the OPT, has led some to believe that the creation of an independent, sovereign Palestinian state is impossible.

Perhaps one of the clearest indicators that there is no Palestinian state-in-waiting under Israel’s regime of control is East Jerusalem.

Israel has three, inter-related strategic goals for East Jerusalem:

1. To make the claim that Jerusalem is the ‘eternal, undivided Jewish capital’ a physical reality.
2. Increase the Jewish presence/decrease the Palestinian presence (‘the demographic battle’).
3. Cut off East Jerusalem from the West Bank.

These are not new, but over two decades – and perhaps especially in the last few years – there has been an acceleration of the tactics being used to realise these goals. The rest of this article will provide a simple, by no means comprehensive, overview of Israel’s policies in East Jerusalem that have effectively killed the possibility of establishing a Palestinian capital.

Mapping the land and creating colonies

Since 1967, Israel has created a number of settlements in the unilaterally expanded city boundaries, with a current population of over 180,000. This represents an expansion of 65% since 1987, while the land taken up by the East Jerusalem colonies went up by 143% in the same time frame (OCHA, opens as PDF).

The purpose of the settlements, both those close to the Old City, as well as the ‘outer ring’ (or Jerusalem ‘envelope’) has been to make the annexation of East Jerusalem a fait accompli. As ex-deputy mayor of Jerusalem, Meron Benvenisti commented, the aim of the expropriation of land around Jerusalem just three years into the post-’67 occupation was “to encircle the city with huge dormitory suburbs ‘that would obviate any possibility of the redivision of Jerusalem’”.

Israel’s annexation of land around Jerusalem almost tripled (PDF) the land under the city’s municipal authority. A third of the annexed land was expropriated for settlements, and over forty years, more than 50,000 housing units were built for the Jewish population on this land; none, of course, for Palestinians.

From 2000 to 2009, Israel confiscated PDF) over 40,000 dunams in Jerusalem; just under two-thirds of that total was taken in the last five years (’05-’09). In April last year, the UN OCHA reported (PDF) that only 13% of the Israeli-annexed area of East Jerusalem is ‘zoned’ for Palestinian construction (if permission is obtained).

‘Zoning’ land in East Jerusalem for particular purposes is an important way that Israel limits the natural growth of the Palestinian population. Some areas are declared ‘Green’, meaning no building is permitted there. In Jabal Mukaber, for example, 15,000 Palestinian residents are kept to 20% of the neighbourhood’s land, with the rest marked ‘Green’. However, there are a number of settlements that were built on land previously zoned as ‘Green’.

Targeting Palestinian neighbourhoods

Another strategy that has recently come under the spotlight is the targeting of Palestinian communities in East Jerusalem by extremist religious settler movements. In Sheikh Jarrah, Palestinians are being evicted from their homes in order for religious Jews to move in, a phenomenon described by ex-Tourism Minister – and supporter of the settlers – Benny Elon as “a microcosm of the entire story of Jerusalem”.

(Elon has highlighted Jewish settlement in Sheikh Jarrah as part of a plan “to create a Jewish continuum surrounding the Old City”, with other methods including “declaring open areas to be national parks and placing state property back-to-back with lands under Jewish ownership”.)

The irony about the Sheikh Jarrah evictions is that the settlers are making their case in the courts based on a claim of pre-1948 ownership. Palestinians dispossessed in the Nakba would not be hopeful of regaining their property on the same basis – whether in West Jerusalem or elsewhere.

Is not it absurd that the very same Palestinian whose property was confiscated in 1948 finds that his new home is confiscated on the grounds that it was owned previously to 1948 by Jews? What is it precisely that distinguishes the claim of the Jew from that of the Palestinian?

Uri Bank, a political activist for the extreme-right Moledet party, described the process and objective in comments made in 2003: “We break up Arab continuity and their claim to East Jerusalem by putting in isolated islands of Jewish presence in areas of Arab population…Our eventual goal is Jewish continuity in all of Jerusalem.” Ariel Sharon once boasted that the “goal” was “not leaving one neighbourhood in East Jerusalem without Jews”.

Meanwhile, archaeological excavations are delegated by Israeli authorities to ideologically-driven right-wing Jewish groups.  Silwan is home to the ‘City of David’ project, a tourism-oriented initiative of the settler group Elad. Dozens of Palestinian homes in Silwan are threatened with demolition, while Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat hopes to develop the area “in terms of historical and religious tourism”.

In May 2009, Ha’aretz revealed that the Israeli Prime Minister’s office and Jerusalem municipality were working with settler groups to “surround the Old City of Jerusalem with nine national parks, pathways and sites”. The Jerusalem Development Authority said the aim was “to strengthen Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel”.

The Israel Lands Administration works “together with the [settlement-promoting] Ateret Cohanim association”, while the new “Samaria and Judea District Police” headquarters in the strategic E1 area received funding from both the state and right-wing Jewish groups. It is little wonder that EU consuls in East Jerusalem felt moved to accuse “the Israeli government and the Jerusalem municipality” of assisting right-wing groups in “their efforts to implement this ‘strategic vision’ [of altering the city’s demographic balance and severing East Jerusalem from the West Bank].

The road network

Planning transportation links, and particularly road networks, is a vital part of shaping the nature of how a city develops. The Jerusalem municipality understands this, and thus the roads that go through and around occupied East Jerusalem are another part of Israel’s strategy.

One particularly key project is the Eastern Ring Road, the idea of which is to ‘join the dots’ between Israeli colonies in East Jerusalem, and West Jerusalem. A proposed 11km section of the route goes through numerous Palestinian villages and neighbourhoods of Jerusalem, meaning the confiscation of over 1,000 dunams of land. According to a report in the Jerusalem Post in 2006, the idea of the ring road goes back some years, “and was first sketched onto maps by Ariel Sharon during his tenure as a Likud minister and planner of construction efforts designed to erase Israel’s Green Line boundary with the West Bank”.

Palestinians, meanwhile, are being built ‘alternative’ roads, in order to link up different enclaves. When serving as the UN’s Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the OPT, South African legal professor John Dugard described what he called “Israel’s broader plan to replace territorial contiguity with ‘transportational contiguity’ by artificially connecting Palestinian population centres through an elaborate network of alternate roads and tunnels and creating segregated road networks, one for Palestinians and another for Israeli settlers, in the West Bank”.

It is also important to mention the Jerusalem Light Rail, a project that has suffered setbacks on account of the international BDS movement. Once again, while the public, official purpose of the rail line is “relieving traffic congestion and renewal of the city centre”, the map of the route confirms that is another way of the Jerusalem municipality consolidating the colonisation of the eastern half of the city.

The dividing Wall

Israel’s Separation Wall cuts through occupied East Jerusalem, dividing neighbourhoods, villages, families, and streets:

The wall epitomises all the tactics of domination. It more than doubles the area of East Jerusalem, creating a clover shape to include the new settlements and their development zones: Bet Horon, Givat Zeev, Givon Hadasha and the future Nabi Samuel park; Har Gilo, Betar Ilit and the Etzion Bloc; Maale Adumim.

OCHA describes the Wall’s deliberate function of inclusion/exclusion:

The route runs deep into the West Bank to encircle the large settlements of Giv’at Zeev (pop. 11,000) and Ma’ale Adummim (pop. 28,000). These settlements currently lie outside the municipal boundary but will be physically connected to Jerusalem by the Barrier. By contrast, densely populated Palestinian areas – Shu’fat Camp, Kafr ‘Aqab, and Samiramees with a total population of over 30,000 – which are currently inside the municipal boundary, are separated from East Jerusalem by the Barrier.

The Wall has created an enclave in Bir Nabala, where 15,000 Palestinians are surrounded. There are now some 50,000 Palestinians with Jerusalem residency who find themselves on the wrong side of the Wall.

Palestinians: immigrants in their own city

The Palestinians of East Jerusalem have ‘permanent residency’ status from the Israeli authorities. They are not citizens. In fact, as Attorney Yotam Ben-Hillel put it, Palestinians of East Jerusalem “are treated as if they were immigrants to Israel, despite the fact that it is Israel that came to them in 1967”.

The next time someone tells you that Israel is the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’, ask them why there are over 100,000 children in Jerusalem who were born without citizenship.

A Palestinian ‘resident’ does not need a permit to live and work in Israel, and is also entitled to health insurance and other social rights. However, ‘residents’ do not have the right to vote in national elections, can not automatically pass this status on to their children, and, are liable to having their ‘permanent residency’ revoked – which can happen without appeal or even notification.

In 2008, Israel stripped over 4,500 Palestinians in East Jerusalem of their residency status, which is a third of the total revocations since 1967. A leaked EU Heads of Mission report in 2005 observed that when it comes to the residency status policy, “Israel’s main motivation is almost certainly demographic”.

Restricting home construction

A fundamental part of Israel’s strategy in East Jerusalem is to restrict the ability for Palestinians to build or expand their houses, which restricts the growth of the community and also makes for conditions in which normal life becomes increasingly untenable.

The Jerusalem municipality’s discriminatory approach to housing means that as many as 40% of houses in East Jerusalem are ‘illegal’, because they were built without having received the proper building permit. Permits, like in ‘Area C’ of the West Bank, are routinely denied – an EU report last year noted that Silwan had received only 20 building permits since 1967. The process of applying is also highly – often prohibitively – costly: over $25,000 for a 200 sq metre building. In 2009, over 900 demolition orders for Palestinian houses were issued by the Jerusalem municipality, with dozens carried out.

The Israeli newspaper Yediot Yerushaliyim reported in April of last year that the Jerusalem municipality “intends to spend 1.2 million shekels on aerial photographing to track building offenders, in the eastern part of the city in particular”. Earlier this month, Ha’aretz referred to the existence of a NIS 2 million budget “for demolishing and sealing off illegal structures”.

While encouraging and facilitating intensified colonisation of East Jerusalem, Mayor Nir Barkat sometimes feels compelled to make positive noises about providing solutions to the ‘Arab housing shortage’. Yet even when Barkat announced plans for new houses, over two-thirds of the units will take 20 years to complete – by which time, there will be a 74% shortfall in Palestinian housing needs.

The death of Palestinian East Jerusalem and Israeli ‘democracy’

It is not difficult to understand the rationale behind the outworking of the permit system and the demolitions, or to see the vision at work behind all the various policies covered briefly here. Teddy Kollek, mayor of Jerusalem from 1965 to 1993, quotes government officials in his 1994 book as saying that, “[It is necessary] to make life difficult for the Arabs, not to allow them to build…” An engineer and chief planner for the municipality once confirmed that the “only way to manage” the ratio between the Palestinian and Jewish population is “[through manipulation] of housing potential]”.

Amir Cheshin served as senior advisor on ‘Arab Affairs’ for ten years under Kollek and then Ehud Olmert. The book he went on to co-author does not shy away from the reality of Israel’s policies in East Jerusalem:

Kollek spearheaded the effort by Israel to settle east Jerusalem with Jewish families. In 1970 Kollek coauthored the proposal for development in east Jerusalem that became the basis for Israeli policy for the next decade. Indeed, the 1970 Kollek plan contains the principles upon which Israeli housing policy in east Jerusalem is based to this day – expropriation of Arab-owned land, development of large Jewish neighbourhoods in east Jerusalem, and limitations on development in Arab neighbourhoods.

This month, Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat described the Palestinians in East Jerusalem as a “strategic threat”, at a meeting of a Knesset lobby group. Barkat worried about the percentages, and the difficulty of keeping the Palestinians at 30% of Jerusalem’s population, the apparent goal. As ex-deputy mayor Benvenisti says, “It’s pure racism. We live in the only city in the world where an ethnic population ratio serves as a philosophy”.

In the words of the director of Israel’s Macro Centre for Political Economics, in order “to try to guarantee a Jewish majority and generate Jewish hegemony in Jerusalem”, Israel “has annexed huge parts of Jerusalem, enlarged the boundaries of the municipality, taken lots of land in the eastern part of the city and built more than 50,000 housing units on this land exclusively for Jews”.

This overview of Israel’s deliberate colonisation of East Jerusalem in defiance of international law only begins to scratch the surface. In the international ‘peace process’ and associated media reports, Jerusalem is typically presented as a ‘final status’ issue in the negotiations to establish a Palestinian state. Through policies going back 40 years, Israel’s leaders from across the political spectrum have made it clear that as far as they are concerned, Jerusalem’s ‘status’ is already final.



Are West Bank Settlements Illegal?

From: The Magnes Zionist -Blogspot

According to Rightwing Zionist Lawyers, No; According to Every Other Legal Expert In the World, Yes

Jeremiah Haber, 3 January 2010

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In his dissenting opinion to the 2004 decision of the International Criminal Court against Israel’s “Separation Wall” Judge Thomas Buergenthal wrote:

Paragraph 6 of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention also does not admit for exceptions on grounds of military or security exigencies. It provides that “the Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies”. I agree that this provision applies to the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and that their existence violates Article 49, paragraph 6. It follows that the segments of the wall being built by Israel to protect the settlements are ipso facto in violation of international humanitarian law. Moreover, given the demonstrable great hardship to which the affected Palestinian population is being subjected in and around the enclaves created by those segments of the wall, I seriously doubt that the wall would here satisfy the proportionality requirement to qualify as a legitimate measure of self-defence. (The opinion can be read on Mitchell Bard’s website, the Jewish Virtual Library, here.)

Buergenthal, a Holocaust survivor, a distinguished human rights judge, and a hero in Israel for his dissenting opinion in this case, did not even bother to argue that Israeli settlements are illegal. By 2004, no serious legal expert thought otherwise.

Perhaps it is fitting that one year after the Gaza fiasco, the Israeli Hasbara crowd – those on the right wing of it, anyway – are resurrecting some very old chestnuts, like: the West Bank is not Occupied Territory, or that if it is, the Fourth Geneva Convention does not apply to it, or that if it does, Israel is not violating it through settlements, blah, blah, blah.

These are pre-Intifada positions that date from the seventies and the eighties, and even then were advanced only by Israeli apologists, albeit some people who had distinguished themselves in other spheres, like Eugene Rostow and Julius Stone. In Israel, some of them may still be the official position, but no thinking person takes them seriously, certainly not in public discourse. The Israeli High Court, heck, even Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, considered the Palestinian population of the West Bank be under occupation. George W. Bush called upon Israel to end the occupation. Until Vladimir Avigdor Lieberman took over the Foreign Ministry, that particular chestnut weren’t even roasting on an open fire.

No further evidence of the death of these positions is needed than the venue of their “resurrection” (the Wall Street Journal and Commentary) and the right-wingers who are making them (deputy foreign minister of Israel, Danny Ayalon, and Northeastern law professor, David M. Philllips) Danny Ayalon, a member of the ultra-rightwing party Yisrael Beiteinu, claims that the territories are not occupied but rather disputed, using arguments that I have not heard in thirty years – in fact, since Gene Rostow and Julius Stone made them. In fact, I have no idea what is the Hebrew phrase for the “disputed territories” – whoever refers to “territories” (as opposed to Judea and Samaria) uses the adjective kevushim “conquered”. And since Israel controls these territories as a result of military conquest and against the will of the inhabitants, they sure are conquered.

Matt Duss does a good job of disemboweling Ayalon here. My favorite part is in his reference (thanks to Gershom Gorenberg’s “The Accidental Empire“) to the memo prepared by the legal counsel of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Theodor Meron in 1967

As recounted by Israeli journalist and historian Gershom Gorenberg — whose history of the settlements is well worth reading — “the legal counsel of the Foreign Ministry, Theodor Meron, was asked whether international law allowed settlement in the newly conquered land.”

In a memo marked “Top Secret,” Mr. Meron wrote unequivocally, “My conclusion is that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”

In the detailed opinion that accompanied that note, Mr. Meron explained that the Convention — to which Israel was a signatory — forbade an occupying power from moving part of its population to occupied territory. [...]

Mr. Meron took note of Israel’s diplomatic argument that the West Bank was not “normal” occupied territory, because the land’s status was uncertain. The prewar border with Jordan had been a mere armistice line, and Jordan had annexed the West Bank unilaterally.

But he rejected that argument for two reasons. The first was diplomatic: the international community would not accept it and would regard settlement as showing “intent to annex the West Bank to Israel.” The second was legal, he wrote: “In truth, certain Israeli actions are inconsistent with the claim that the West Bank is not occupied territory.” For instance, he noted, a military decree issued on the third day of the war in June said that military courts must apply the Geneva Conventions in the West Bank.

Unfortunately, the Israeli government ignored Meron’s legal advice, and developed a series of shifting legal rationales to justify the annexation and colonization of the occupied land, which has helped to create the exceedingly difficult and volatile situation we have today

As for David M. Phillips’s piece, it is essentially preaching old (and one or two bizarre new) arguments to the choir, but in the sort of disingenuous manner expected from the ideological biased. For example, consider this seemingly innocuous paragraph:

To [Eugene] Rostow, “Jews have a right to settle in it under the Mandate,” a right he declared to be “unchallengeable as a matter of law.” In accord with these views, Israel has historically characterized the West Bank as “disputed territory” (although some senior government officials have more recently begun to use the term “occupied territory”).

One would hardly know from this description that a) Eugene Rostow, a life-long Zionist and defender of Israel, himself referred to the territories as “under occupation” or b) that “some senior government officials” included the two former prime ministers of Israel, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert. True, they did not institute an official change of policy, but nobody to the left of Dore Gold’s rightwing think tank, the Jerusalem Center of Public Affairs, bothers with arguing that the territories are not occupied.

Phillips writes like somebody who only recently converted to the hasbara squad and, with the zeal of the convert, revives the dead horse. And poor Julius Stone, introduced disingenuously by Phillips merely as “an international law scholar”! Stone was another example of a brilliant and influential Jewish legal thinker who used his considerable acumen (and passion) in defense of the tribe. (See Andrew Dahl’s overly generous deconstruction of Stone’s biases here.) At least Stone came up with those positions decades ago, when the Stock Zionist Narrative was dominant, before the work of the New Historians and the outbreak of two Intifadas. At that time, somebody could get away with the quaint view that the West Bank was captured in a defensive war, that the Palestinians did not have a right as a people to self-determination, that three “No’s of Khartoum” derailed Israel’s genuine desire for peace (on this see Avi Shlaim’s The Iron Wall), and most of all, that the Occupation was intended as a temporary measure until a credible partner would emerge.

Phillips argues (against everybody else in the world, except Stone, from whom he takes the argument), that the Fourth Geneva Convention forbids only forcible transfers of one’s population to occupied territory (surprise, the West Bank is now suddenly occupied!) So the settler’s “voluntary movement” is not prohibited. And this Phillips infers not only from the formal language but from the intent of the pertinent clause, which was to ensure that citizens would not be forcibly deported from their land, as the Jews were during the Holocaust. Phillips citation of Stone is revealing:

We would have to say that the effect of Article 49(6) is to impose an obligation on the State of Israel to ensure (by force if necessary) that these areas, despite their millennial association with Jewish life, shall be forever judenrein. Irony would thus be pushed to the absurdity of claiming that Article 49(6), designed to prevent repetition of Nazi-type genocidal policies of rendering Nazi metropolitan territories judenrein, has now come to mean that . . . the West Bank . . . must be made judenrein and must be so maintained, if necessary by the use of force by the government of Israel against its own inhabitants. Common sense as well as correct historical and functional context exclude so tyrannical a reading of Article 49(6).

After reading this passage, a reasonable person would simply dismiss anything Stone has to say in defense of Israel’s (then) legal position as blinded by his, quite admirable, Jewish loyalties. But more importantly, most intelligent Israelis also dismiss it. The issue is not merely Jewish settlement; it is Jewish settlement that serves as the basis for future claims of sovereignty, that thwarts the possibility of the self-determination of the Palestinians, takes away their resources, and confines them to Bantustans. For God’s sake – who but the settlers use the language of Judenrein anymore? And if one wants to talk about historical associations, what about the historical associations of the Palestinian refugees with Palestine, where whole sections are now Arabenrein?

Phillips writes:

The settlements are also a far cry from policies implemented by the Soviet Union in the late 1940s and early 1950s to alter the ethnic makeup of the Baltic states by initially deporting hundreds of thousands of people and encouraging Russian immigration.

Nor can they be compared to the efforts by China to alter the ethnic makeup of Tibet by forcibly scattering its native population and moving Chinese into Tibetan territory. Israel’s settlement policies are also not comparable to the campaign by Morocco to alter the ethnic makeup of the Western Sahara by transferring Moroccan Arabs to displace the native Saharans, who now huddle in refugee camps in Algeria, or to the variety of population displacements that occurred in the various parts of the former Yugoslavia.

Note that he does not say why these comparisons are invalid – on the contrary, they are quite valid, certainly in the eyes of the settlers, who view the goal of the settlements inter alia to thwart Palestinian self-determination and openly say that Arabs should be expelled from Eretz Yisrael. In fact, the settlers view themselves as the vanguard of a large movement of Israelis that would simply make a Palestinian state impossible. And while successive Israeli governments have not been as ideologically motivated as the hard-core settlers, or have shown more or less ambivalence, they have never put the settlers on the leash – on the contrary, they have encouraged them to settle in areas which Israel coveted. And they have used the resources of the Occupied Territories as cheap land for the expansion of their population. Still, the comparisons are not entirely valid; China, for example, made the Tibetans citizens of China, whereas the Israelis simply want to control the natural resources of the Palestinians, and herd them into enclaves. (A more valid comparison with China would be the actions of the Zionists in 1948).

And here is another example of Phillips’s disingenuousness:

After the Elon Moreh case, all Israeli settlements legally authorized by the Israeli Military Administration (a category that, by definition, excludes “illegal outposts” constructed without prior authorization or subsequent acceptance) have been constructed either on lands that Israel characterizes as state-owned or “public” or, in a small minority of cases, on land purchased by Jews from Arabs after 1967.

I cannot believe that a Northeastern University Law Professor is unaware of the Peace Now report in 2006, and its amended report in 2007, which shows that the majority of the West Bank settlements, including the outposts considered by Israel to be illegal, are built on what the Civil Administration itself considers to be Palestinian private lands. Or what about the Ofra settlement, which then Vice Prime Minister Haim Ramon, said was built almost entirely on private land? Not a week goes by without a Haaretz article that belies the official state position. Where has Phillips been for the last twenty years?

As for Phillip’s own arguments: well, consider this one:

Concluding that Israeli settlements violate Article 49(6) also overlooks the Jewish communities that existed before the creation of the state in areas occupied by today’s Israeli settlements, for example, in Hebron and the Etzion bloc outside Jerusalem. These Jewish communities were destroyed by Arab armies, militias, and rioters, and, as in the case of Hebron, the community’s population was slaughtered. Is it sensible to interpret Article 49 to bar the reconstitution of Jewish communities that were destroyed through aggression and slaughter? If so, the international law of occupation runs the risk of freezing one occupier’s conduct in place, no matter how unlawful.

In fact, if Article 49(6) allowed an occupier to reestablish by force ethnic communities that no longer existed, then that would give license to all sorts of irredentist schemes. For example, since Israel’s occupation of the areas outside the 1947 Partition Plan is still not formally recognized (except, perhaps, by the PLO), this would license Palestinian irredentists who wish to reconstruct the 500 villages that Israel destroyed during and after the 1948 war. (Phillips seems to be unaware that Israel has tripled the territory of the Ezion bloc under the rubric of “rebuilding a destroyed community”)

But my favorite argument – the real doozy – the one that illustrates the depth of Phillips’ grasp of the situation here — is the thought experiment that he suggests:

Suppose a group of Palestinian Arabs who are citizens of Israel requested permission to establish a community on the West Bank. Further, assume that Israel facilitated the community’s establishment, without the loss of their citizenship, on land purchased from other Palestinian Arabs (not citizens of Israel) or on state land. Would establishment of this settlement violate Article 49(6)? If not, how can one distinguish the hypothetical Arab settlements from Jewish settlements?

Let’s grant him, contra sixty years of experience, that the state facilitates the establishment of any new community of “Palestinian Arabs who are citizens of Israel” (what a pleasure to see that phrase used in Commentary!) Would it do so on land that it will claim during negotiations? Or land that it would trade for other land? Then clearly that would be a violation of Article 49(6), no matter who Israel placed there.

Reading articles like that of Phillips reminds me of the story that Gershom Gorenberg told me once. When attacked by a group of well-meaning, but clueless, American Zionists, he said to them, “You are the best reason I can think of for aliyah – at least in Israel I don’t have to listen to such narrishkeit.”

Serves me right for reading it.

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Who will save Gaza's children?

Never mind Copenhagen, an environmental catastrophe is going on right now – contaminated water is poisoning babies in Gaza

Victoria Brittain

9 December 2009

Palestinian children take part in a human chain protest, near the Erez crossing, against the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip. Photograph: Suhaib Salem/Reuters

Among all the complex and long-term solutions being sought in Copenhagen for averting environmental catastrophe across the world, there is one place where the catastrophe has already happened, but could be immediately ameliorated with one simple political act.

In Gaza there is now no uncontaminated water; of the 40,000 or so newborn babies, at least half are at immediate risk of nitrate poisoning – incidence of "blue baby syndrome", methaemoglobinaemia, is exceptionally high; an unprecedented number of people have been exposed to nitrate poisoning over 10 years; in some places the nitrate content in water is 300 times World Health Organisation standards; the agricultural economy is dying from the contamination and salinated water; the underground aquifer is stressed to the point of collapse; and sewage and waste water flows into public spaces and the aquifer.

The blockade of Gaza has gone on for nearly four years, and the vital water and sanitation infrastructure went past creaking to virtual collapse during the three-week assault on the territory almost a year ago.

What would it take to start the two UN sewerage repair projects approved by Israel; a UN water and sanitation project, not yet approved; and two more UN internal sewage networks, not yet approved? Right now just one corner of the blockade could be lifted for these building materials and equipment to enter Gaza, to let water works begin and to give infant lives a chance. Just one telephone call from the Israeli defence ministry could do it – an early Christmas present to the UN staff on the ground who have been ready to act for months and have grown desperate on this front, as on so many others.

Earlier this year, just one question face to face to the Israeli government, from Senator John Kerry after he visited Gaza, allowed pasta into Gaza. Who from Europe or the US will ask the Israeli defence minister the face-to-face question for the blue babies? Sarah Brown, the British prime minister's wife, would be the perfect candidate – an independent person who has the ear of the powerful, a mother who knows something about grief for babies. And she could be accompanied by Lord Mandelson in case there was any bullying.

The science on all this is unchallenged. Last September a UN report spelled it out in stark detail, including the regional implications for Israel and Egypt if the shared aquifer is not "rested" and alternative water sources found. The United Nations Environment Programme estimated that $1.5bn could be needed over 20 years to restore the aquifer, including the establishment of desalination plants to take the pressure off the underground water supplies.

Gaza's huge pale sandy beaches used to be society's playground and reassurance of happiness and normality, with families picnicking, horses exercising, fishermen mending their nets, children swimming and boys exercising in the early morning, but these days they are mainly empty, and not just because it is winter. Between 50m and 60m litres of untreated sewage have flowed into the Mediterranean every day this year since the end of the Israeli invasion in January, the sea smells bad and few fish are available in the three nautical mile area Palestinians are allowed in. This resource seems as ruined as the rubble of Gaza's parliament and ministries.

A visitor to Gaza could miss this underground disaster, seeing what the surreal economy of the tunnels from Egypt has brought in: a chic new coffee house, with new furniture and prints on the wall, which would not be out of place in Piccadilly, fish from Oman for restaurants, fat sheep and goats for the Eid feast, new cars reassembled after being cut into four, huge motorbikes straight out of Easy Rider, bustling markets full of foods, clothes, fridges, washing machines, pharmaceuticals, some brought in to order, and much more. Some people are getting very rich on both sides of the Rafah border.

But the tunnels are a small slice of the reality. "We have run out of words to describe how bad it is here," says John Ging, director of operations for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Gaza. Ging heads a team of 10,000 mainly Palestinian workers who run the aid supplies that are all that stand between the vast majority of Gazans and destitution. "We have 80% unemployment, an economy at subsistence level, infrastructure destroyed, etc, but even worse than the humanitarian plight is the destruction of civil society."

Ging's great preoccupation is "the 750,000 children susceptible to an environment where things are moving rapidly in the wrong direction, where the injustice is bewildering, and every day worse".

There is a big problem of insecurity and violence here, and it is getting worse. Most adults display stoic resilience, and cling to a belief in traditional values, but there is a compelling narrative by extremists which becomes ever more difficult to combat. Only lifting the siege would change the dynamic.

An international community that has accepted the "normalcy" of the degrading tunnel economy for Gaza, shames us all. Ending the water emergency should be the first step to breaking the blockade.

Shattering Israel's image of 'democracy'

By Ben White

Guardian 'Comment is Free'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/03/israel-negev

Thursday 3 December 2009 10.00 GMT

A struggle over land, home demolitions, and an Israeli government working with Jewish agencies to "develop" the land for the benefit of one group at the expense of another. It could be a picture of the illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, but in fact, it's inside Israel – in the Negev.

The Negev, or al-Naqab in Arabic, is an area that since the inception of the state has been targeted by Israeli governments, along with agencies like the Jewish National Fund (JNF), for so-called "development".

This investment in the country's periphery is characterised by systematic discrimination against the Negev's Bedouin population, many of whom live in "unrecognised" villages or townships. Recent developments bring these policies into sharper focus, as well as pointing to fundamental problems with Israel's image as "the Middle East's only democracy".

First, three vital clinics serving Bedouin women and children have been shut down, with the result that the nearest equivalent facilities are now hours away. The official reason is a shortage of staff, but this does not sit well with the severity of the health problem among these Bedouin children, where the infant mortality rate is more than three times higher than in the Israeli Jewish community.

Second, in mid-November the Knesset passed an amendment to prevent around 25,000 Bedouins from voting for their mayor and regional councillors. Elections had already been postponed for two years, but now the law means "that as long as the minister of interior deems the residents not ready for elections, the elections will be postponed".

Finally, six weeks ago, lawyers acting on behalf of the Bedouins who live in the unrecognised village of Umm al-Hieran appealed against a previous court decision ordering the eviction of the community's residents.

Ironically, this village had been established by the Israeli military in the 1950s as part of a wider-scale forced relocation of Bedouins from territory intended for Jewish settlement. Now they are once again being targeted for removal, labelled "intruders", to make way for the planned creation of a Jewish town, Hiran.

Meanwhile, there have been reports about a Bedouin "mini-intifada" in the Negev, with Israeli military personnel targeted on the roads near a key base. Such fears are not new: a Haaretz article in 2004 predicted that a "Bedouin intifada" was "on the way" – a conclusion supposedly shared by senior government and military leaders.

What then, is the wider context? As a Human Rights Watch report put it last year, "the state's motives for these discriminatory, exclusionary and punitive policies can be elicited from policy documents and official rhetoric". The Israeli state's aim: "maximising its control over Negev land and increasing the Jewish population in the area for strategic, economic and demographic reasons". Professor Oren Yifatchel of Ben-Gurion University has put it bluntly: "the government wants to de-Arabise the land".

This is the common thread that runs through Israel's approach to the Negev since 1948: from physical expulsions and the legislation used to exclude communities from official recognition, through to budget allocations, creating Bedouin townships, and the flipside of "development" – demolitions.

In 2003, then-PM Ariel Sharon announced a new initiative calling "for the establishment of some 30 new towns" in the Galilee and Negev. One of the PM's advisers at the time, Uzi Keren, told a radio station that it was important to locate the new towns in "the places that are important to the state, that is, for Jewish settlement", in order to "strengthen settlement in areas sparse in Jewish population".

One of the groups helping the state is the Jewish Agency for Israel. A few years ago, the organisation's foreign media liaison officer was quoted on the JTA news website as describing the goal of the joint venture with the Israeli government as "a Jewish majority in all parts of Israel".

Another key organisation involved is the Jewish National Fund. Its UK website, for example, talks about how "the future of Israel lies in the Negev" and says the goal of the "major initiative" known as "Blueprint Negev" is to "revitalise Israel's southern region".

In January, the chief executive of JNF in the US, Russell Robinson, expressed his concern that "if we don't get 500,000 people to move to the Negev in the next five years, we're going to lose it". To what – or who – went unsaid. In 2005, Robinson was clearer about the consequences of the JNF's "project to remake" the demographics: "such an influx" of Jews would mean "a certain amount of displacement" for the Bedouin.

Robinson actually tried to present this as helping tackle Bedouin unemployment. With their slick focus on "environmentally friendly" initiatives and helping the disadvantaged Arabs, groups like the JNF do their best to make sure that scenes like this go unnoticed.

This is the Israel that its government and propagandists do not want to be seen, the Israel where non-Jews are a demographic "threat", and the state works with agencies (often funded by western donors) to "secure" a Jewish majority. It is the reality behind the myth of Israel as the region's only democracy, and away from the weekly twists and turns of the peace process, such policies shed light on the root problem preventing a resolution of the conflict just as well as, or better than, the number of housing units in Gilo.

In the shadow of an Israeli settlement

Givat Ze'ev settlement is separated from local Palestinians by Israel's West Bank barrier

Extensive diplomatic efforts towards reviving Mid-East peace talks have yielded little. The US has continued to demand Israel freeze settlement activity in the West Bank, while Palestinians refuse to negotiate without a freeze.

In the second of a two-part investigation, the BBC's Martin Asser sees the effect of settlements on the lives of Palestinians.

They are called the Seven Villages, situated north-west of Jerusalem where the West Bank hills fall away towards the Mediterranean.

SEVEN VILLAGES POPULATIONS Beit Anan - 4,264 Beit Duqqu - 1,600 Beit Ijza - 671 Beit Surik - 3,818 Qubeiba - 2,069 Qatanna - 7,496 Source: Palestinian Authority (2006)

Though their inhabitants live within the Palestinian Authority's Jerusalem governorate, few get to visit Jerusalem - though the city was "like a mother to us" one man said.

While Israelis in nearby Givat Ze'ev settlement bloc zip to Jerusalem by car in minutes, the Palestinian villagers need permission from Israel's military authorities.

If they don't get permission, apparently the norm, there are roundabout ways past Israel's defences and into the city, but this risks jail and a stiff fine.

Israel says all restrictions are imposed to prevent Palestinian militants wreaking havoc with suicide bombings.

But, the Seven Villages is known as a quiet area. Israeli soldiers I spoke to said there was very little militant activity.

Palestinian residents insist they are peaceable folk - famers, labourers, some professionals - who just want to live normal, decent lives.

Enclosed lives

Everyone I met said their world was dominated by Israel's occupation of the West Bank, in place since the 1967 war.

After occupation came Jewish settlements; after the violent Palestinian uprising of 2000 came Israel's vast infrastructure to protect the settlements. Now villagers in this area of the West Bank are hemmed in on all sides.

To the West and South Israel's West Bank barrier follows roughly the pre-1967 border. To the East it snakes deep into the territory around Givat Ze'ev. To the North is the heavily defended Highway 443, connecting northern Jerusalem to Tel Aviv.

There are two official exits: via a 1.3km-long sunken road through the Givat Ze'ev loop towards Ramallah, and via Beit Iksa village towards Jerusalem.

The recently completed underpass - built on confiscated Palestinian land - made a significant improvement on the tortuous route people used to take to the West Bank's main city.

But simultaneously, Israel built a military checkpoint on the road to Beit Iksa, and now only its residents can pass.

Many villagers were concerned that, although the underpass undoubtedly made life easier, it also made it easier for Israel to lock down the whole area with a very small military deployment.

High price

While Palestinians insist the barrier is part of a land grab, Israelis officials say its purpose is purely defensive and, furthermore, temporary so it could be removed if peace breaks out.

Mahmoud Salim's lives in the "security zone" beside the West Bank barrier

But it has already taken a heavy price in the Seven Villages.

I met Mahmoud Salim on his way from Beit Ijza to the centremost village of Biddu to pay his electricity bill.

His house is located in a security zone for the barrier, which passes 15 metres away. His farmland lies on the other side and he has been told by the army he cannot "put one stone on another" in what's left of his garden.

He remembered the day in 2004 when Israeli troops first came to secure the area.

"People wanted to defend their land, but troops opened fire as though faced by another army. My son was the first one killed, though he wasn't involved in the demonstrations."

He is not the only such case in the Seven Villages. I met another man by chance in Beit Duqqu whose brother was killed in the same clashes.

Security anomalies

Some villagers, thanks to the barrier, find themselves in positions of such extraordinary and precarious absurdity you can scarcely believe what you're seeing.

The Sabri family home is in the middle of an elaborate high-security installation

The Sabris live on the east side of the barrier, embedded in a small settlement south of Givat Ze'ev, but completely surrounded by a six-metre-high wire fence.

Their simple hilltop house is reached by a stark concrete bridge over the barrier, which is dug into the rock below.

The bridge is controlled by a massive steel gate operated remotely by troops in the Atarot base 5km away.

To begin with, the family said, soldiers dutifully closed the gate at night, but now it stands open all the time. One can only guess how much this arrangement added to the cost of the barrier (estimated overall to be $1.3bn).

They talk about a settlement freeze, but they've forgotten the occupation. If we got rid of that, the settlements would go Schoolteacher, Beit Duqqu An Israeli settlement in close-up

On the other side of Givat Ze'ev, to the east, I met the Najadas, whose house lies in a "security zone" between the barrier and the settlement, cut off from their nearest village, al-Jib.

To get to work or school in the village, they walk along the security road next to the barrier to the nearest checkpoint. They cannot use cars or keep goats and have given up the idea of getting their crops to market.

I witnessed Abdul Baset Najada being told by checkpoint guards he couldn't walk along the road, although we were allowed to take him by car.

Disagreement

The people I spoke to seemed unimpressed by Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas's stance that peace talks cannot resume with Israel unless settlement construction ends.

"The papers are all talking about freezing settlements, but they've forgotten the occupation. If we got rid of that, the settlements would go," said a schoolteacher in Beit Duqqu.

Many see Mr Abbas as dancing to Israel's tune, while in their view settlements on 1967 land should not just stop growing, but should be removed completely.

Beit Duqqu is considered particularly affected by the expansion of Givat Ze'ev, one of the fastest growing Jewish settlements.

The village lies just across the valley from the Agan Ha'ayalot development, and it isn't hard to imagine its new Orthodox Jewish residents coming under militant attack from snipers or infiltrators one day.

"God help us if any settler gets hurt," says the schoolteacher, adding with a chuckle: "Maybe there will be an earthquake and we'll all be down in the valley."