Why is Acre afraid of old signs?

http://972mag.com/why-is-acre-afraid-of-old-signs/comment-page-1/#comment-7757

Sunday, March 27 2011|Yossi Gurvitz

An artist placed re-designed street signs, from the Turkish period, in Acre – and Israelis think this “undermines law and order.” Why?

Artist Walid Qashash took a political stand (Hebrew): He designed street signs for the Old City of Acre, as they would look under the Turkish rulers, and hanged them near the normal street signs. Suddenly, after sixty and more years of repression, the street of Sahed Abboud reemerges; Suddenly, Genoa Square, a relic of the town’s crusader past, emerges again from the mists. Qashash has invoked the ghosts the Jews of Israel have been trying to banish, unsuccessfully, for decades.

Which is why this act, which would seem logical in any other city with a historical quarter – so logical, the town would place the signs itself – raised so much anger. Of course, Israel is emphatically not a normal country. It is based on a huge act of theft, which it insists on whitewashing. This is why streets in Jaffa and Acre and Jerusalem are now named after unimportant generals and less worthy Zionist apparatchiks. The entire non-Jewish history of this tortured land – Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Muslim, Crusader, Mamluk, Turkish – had to vanish, to be erased, to be scraped away. The fact that during most of the recorded history of this place, only a small minority wrote or spoke Hebrew, had to pass away. The names of former Palestinian towns and villages had to become a fading memory. Majdl stands no more; Call it Ashkelon (and try to forget its last original residents were deported in 1950, a long time after the war of 1947-1948 ended).

Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomine nuda tenemus: Names are the most enduring things. Rabin Square will still be called, automatically, “Kikar Malkhei Israel” for at least one more generation, possibly more. Myanmar will remain, stubbornly, Burma. Nablus is so called by the entire world aside from Israeli Jews, who claim it is the biblical Shkhem – and its name is an Arab mispronunciation of Neapolis, the name given to it by its creator, the emperor Vespasian. People of my generation will always think of St. Petersburg as Leningrad, but it returned to its real name as soon as the Communist regime collapsed, and this artificial name will be remembered, in a generation or two, only by historians or Soviet enthusiasts. The Turks called their capital Istanbul, but the world still remembers its original name was Constantinople, even 550 after Byzantine Empire fell. The final loss of names, and their replacement with new ones, generally indicates a great catastrophe, in which several generations were lost, so that no one could recall the old names – a rate and traumatic event.

Israel is based on such a trauma – a manufactured one. A stubborn denial of reality despite all the facts. Elik, Moshe Shamir’s mythic character, was not really born from the sea. History did not begin in 1948 (or 1917, or 1897, or 1882). Israeli Jews know, deep inside, that they are inhabiting stolen lands of a people expelled or exterminated. Which is why the denial is so angry – and so old. Rashi starts his exegesis on Genesis by claiming the Bible begins as it does so that gentiles could not claim Jews have stolen Eretz Israel: It was given to them by He who spoke and made the world. But why is such a denial of the theft necessary, on the part of a Jew living in 12th century France? Because the taking of Canaan by storm, as described in the Book of Joshua, is an act of horror; it must be explained away: Jehova is the ultimate excuse. We were only following divine orders.

The Acre municipality threatens to have Qashash tried for… something. Presumably they’ll find an article that’ll stick. After all, Acre is the town where a Palestinian driver was arrested and indicted for driving on Yom Kippur – which is not in violation of any law (Hebrew) – for which he was nearly lynched. The municipality also allows itself an unusually coarse reply, which it almost certainly wouldn’t use towards a Jewish artist:

“We are sorry Mr. Qashash is venting, and is looking for despicable ways to sour relations between Jews and Arabs in the city. He’s better stop whining and join activity for the benefit of the city’s residents, Jews and Arabs alike.”

Ynet’s poll, always indicative of the Jewish mob’s mood, suggests as one of its options “This is a nationalistic act, undermining law and order.” Naturally, this is the preferred option of most people taking the poll. In Israel, mentioning local history is nothing less than a “nationalistic act,” which undermines some imagined “law and order,” that is the law and order which say this is a Jewish state; and that it always was so, even if it was under temporary management by someone else; it was not anyone important, anyone with a history, you see; just a nomad, a migrant worker. And should anyone dare say otherwise, we’ll huff and we’ll puff and we’ll cry “anti-Semitism,” perhaps even “de-legitimization.”

And one more thing: Following the events in the Arab world, it is customary to say that social networks are a tool of revolutionary change, or other such nonsense. Well, yours truly was surprised this weekend to receive an email from Flickr, which loudly informed me it decided to take down one of my pictures – it can be seen here, and used to be called “Fascists on the Prowl” – because, I was sanctimoniously informed, “Flickr is a personal photosharing site, not a venue for interpersonal conflict. In joining Flickr, you agreed to abide by the Terms of Service and Community Guidelines. Specifically, you must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Flickr members.” I was also threatened they may delete my account without any prior notice should the incident repeat itself. I sent an aggressive email back, informing them to the best of my knowledge, the two chaps in the pictures are not Flickr members, and that anyway I can defend my “fascist’ claim at length. I also asked for instructions on how I, as someone whose photos deal often with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the internal Israeli conflict, should behave under a threat of immediate deletion. I received a laconic mail back: “Yes, you can re-upload the photo.” Revolutionary tool, my foot.

"A gross imbalance of power that can't deliver peace, let alone justice."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/26/authentic-leaders-middle-east-peace

 Only authentic leaders can deliver a Middle East peace

This week's leaks have exposed the dangerous folly of US and British
attempts to control and divide the Palestinians
        
       Seumas Milne
       
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 26 January 2011 21.29 GMT
   

It's a tragedy for the Palestinian people that at a time when their cause is
the focus of greater global popular support than ever in their history,
their own political movements to win their rights are in such debilitating
disarray. That has been one of the clearest messages from the cache of
leaked documents al-Jazeera and the Guardian have published over the past
few days. It's not just the scale of one-sided concessions – from refugees
to illegal settlements – offered by Palestinian negotiators and banked for
free by their Israeli counterparts. The constant refrain of ingratiating
desperation is in some ways more shocking. While Israel's Tzipi Livni
rejects the offer to hand over vast chunks of Jerusalem as insufficient –
adding "but I really appreciate it" – and Condi Rice muses over resettling
Palestinian refugees in South America, the chief PLO negotiator, Saeb
Erekat, is reduced to begging for a "figleaf".

It's a study in the decay of what in Yasser Arafat's heyday was an authentic
national liberation movement. Try to imagine the Vietnamese negotiators
speaking in such a way at the Paris peace talks in the 70s – or the Algerian
FLN in the 60s – and it's obvious how far the West Bank Palestinian
leadership has drifted from its national moorings.

However well the basic contours were known, it's scarcely surprising many
Palestinians are still stunned to discover exactly what is being said and
done in their name. Erekat writes in the Guardian that "nothing is agreed
until everything is agreed", and any deal would be put to a referendum. But
as we know from the Palestine papers, he himself made clear in private that
such a vote would exclude most Palestinians, particularly refugees. And as
he told US officials last year, the same package offered three years ago is
"still there", waiting to be picked up.

But simply to point the finger at Palestinian leaders is to miss the point.
What has been highlighted by the documents is not a picture of genuine
negotiation and necessary compromise, but of a gross imbalance of power that
can't deliver peace, let alone justice. What's more, it's one where the
western powers repeatedly intervene to tilt the scales still further against
the victims of the conflict.

What has become clearer from the confidential records is that the talk of
"partners for peace" is a fantasy. A far more mainstream Israeli leadership
than is now in power was not even close to accepting an offer that would
anyway have been almost certainly rejected by Palestinians if they had been
consulted.

And why would Israeli negotiators do anything else when their rejection was
backed to the hilt by the US government? Reading the transcripts of the
talks, they often seem to be simply going through the motions.

It is the story of 20 years of failed peace negotiations that became a
charade, a way to maintain the status quo rather than deliver the promised
two-state solution, and that have now evidently run into the sand.
Inevitably, the vacuum they have left behind can only increase the threat of
renewed war.

This is the same peace process that produced the breakdown of authentic
leadership and the dysfunctional structures of the Palestinian Authority,
which underlie the sorry saga disclosed in the leaked documents.

The PA was designed in the 1993 Oslo agreement to be a temporary
administration for a five-year transition to statehood. Eighteen years later
it has become an open-ended authoritarian quasi state, operating as an
outsourced security arm of the Israeli occupation it was meant to replace,
funded and effectively controlled by the US, Britain and other western
governments.

Its leader's electoral mandate ran out two years ago, and the authority has
become increasingly repressive, imprisoning and torturing both civilian and
military activists from its rival, Hamas, which won the last Palestinian
elections.

With the large bulk of its income coming from the US and the European Union,
the PA's leaders are now far more accountable to their funders than to their
own people. And, as the records of private dealings between US and PA
officials show, it is the American government and its allies that now
effectively pick the Palestinians' leaders.

The new administration expected to see "the same Palestinian faces" in
charge if the cash was to keep flowing, PA officials were told after Obama's
election: Mahmoud Abbas and, more importantly, the Americans' point man,
Salam Fayyad.

And despite some less strident rhetoric, the US and British governments have
continued to promote the division between Fatah and Hamas, in effect
blocking reconciliation while pouring resources and training into the PA
security machine's campaign against the Palestinian Islamist movement.

As we also now know, British intelligence and government officials have been
at the heart of the western effort to turn the PA into an Iraqi-style
counter-insurgency operation against Hamas and other groups that continue to
maintain the option of armed resistance to occupation. Shielded from
political accountability at home, how exactly does British covert support
for detention without trial of Palestinians by other Palestinians promote
the cause of peace and security in the Middle East, or anywhere else? In
reality, it simply makes the chances of a representative Palestinian
leadership that could actually deliver peace with justice even less likely.

The message from the revolutionary events in Tunisia and the spread of
unrest elsewhere in the Arab world should be clear enough. Western support
for dictatorial pro-western regimes across the region for fear of who their
people might elect if given the chance isn't just wrong – it's no longer
working, and risks provoking the very backlash it's aimed to forestall.

That applies even more strongly to the Palestinian territories, under
military occupation for the past 44 years. Unless those governments that
bolster Israeli rejectionism and PA clientalism shift ground, the result
will be to fuel and spread the conflict.

For Palestinians, the priority has to be to start to change that lopsided
balance of power. That will require a more representative and united
national leadership, as the story told by the Palestine papers has rammed
home – which means at the very least a democratic overhaul of Palestinian
institutions, such as the PLO. In the wake of what has now emerged, pressure
for change is bound to grow. Anyone who cares for the Palestinian cause must
hope it succeeds.

        guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011


Murderous Planning

Poor planning and a lack of investment by the Israeli government are the responsible for the grim situation that the city of Lod (Lydda) finds itself in.

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/murderous-planning-1.322383

2 November 2010

By Hillel Schocken 

The government is looking for the solution to the problem of Lod under a street lamp. After a handful of Border Policemen, who were brought there in the wake of two murders, failed to prevent another murder and an attempted murder, the prime minister himself came to the rescue and two days ago brought a comprehensive plan for government approval.

The Public Security Ministry will run the "City Without Violence" program in Lod and carry out projects to establish a situation room, complete a network of surveillance cameras, construct a monitoring and control center with advanced technology, and draw up an enforcement plan for illegal construction. The Social Affairs Ministry will add five slots for social workers. The Culture and Sport Ministry will allocate NIS 800,000 (for two years ) for cultural activities, and the Minority Affairs Ministry will transfer about NIS 3 million for activity earmarked to advance the Arab population. The Tourism Ministry will prepare a preservation plan for tourism in the old city, and the Transportation Ministry will implement transportation projects to make the city and its environs more accessible. A real End of Days scenario.

But the solution to the problem of Lod is located far from the beam of light emanating from the government street lamp. All the abovementioned steps are like aspirin for a chronic illness in the area of planning, which is the responsibility of the Interior Ministry and the Housing and Construction Ministry.

Since the capture of Lod Israeli governments have turned it into the country's junkyard. First they caused the destruction of the old city and replaced it with housing projects. The old city's destruction robbed Lod of its beating heart - a city without a center is a dead city. Later, in the best Israeli planning tradition, new neighborhoods were built with only an incidental connection to the city, and the satellite neighborhoods of Ganei Aviv and Ganei Ya'ar were promoted; their developers tried to refrain from having them identified with Lod, in an attempt to attract a well-to-do Jewish population. But very soon the bluff was discovered and property values plummeted.

Currently the Lod municipality, the Interior Ministry and the Housing and Construction Ministry are promoting a plan to expand the city's area of jurisdiction by annexing thousands of dunams of agricultural land. Acting Mayor Ilan Harari says that "within the confines of the city there are no new areas suitable for developing a large residential neighborhood. Attracting a strong population to Lod could help a great deal in changing its image," (TheMarker, October 21 ). His predecessors made similar statements when they initiated the construction of Ganei Aviv and Ganei Ya'ar, and Lod's image only continued to deteriorate.

The government preferred to invest in new cities. Modi'in and Shoham, both within 5 to 10 kilometers of Lod as the crow flies, have created attractive alternatives for an affluent Jewish population, and Airport City is developing as an attractive employment alternative.

The solution for Lod can be found within the present municipal boundaries. The city, and mainly its center, look like after a bomb attack. Housing projects for the poor are scattered randomly in open and neglected areas. The city is crying out for a massive "evacuate and construct" urban renewal project while at the same time there should be denser, multi-functional construction and investment in the public space. In the short term, it's easier to flee from the problem and build on available agricultural land. The problem is that a high price will be paid in the future, in both blood and money.

Had Israeli governments invested in Lod - and also in Ramle and Acre - a quarter of what they invested in building cities and communities from nothing in the territories and within the Green Line, they would have prevented turning the mixed cities into centers of poverty, backwardness and crime.

All those who are partners to this ongoing planning failure should consider themselves partners to the murders that have taken place, and those to come.

The writer is an architect who teaches at Tel Aviv University and a founder of Merhav - the Movement for Israeli Urbanism.

Living next to the settler neighbors from hell

http://www.middleeastmonitor.org.uk/resources/commentary-and-analysis/1678-living-next-to-the-settler-neighbors-from-hell

Monday, 25 October 2010 13:15

MEMO's Renee Boyer comments on Sharmine Narwani's article "Israel's Human Shields and Live Bait" in the Huffington Post, 8 October 2010. Sharmine Narwani is a Senior Associate, St. Antony's College, Oxford University.

Living in the West Bank in Palestine means dealing with occupation on a daily basis. It means seeing IDF forces at the entrance to most cities and villages of the West Bank; it means dealing with roadblocks and checkpoints, invasions and arrests. It means that an occupying military force controls every facet of life. But living in the West Bank means dealing with more than this massive invasion on one's life. It means dealing with the Israeli settler as well and this is sometimes more frightening than dealing with the Israeli military.

In many ways the settler project is the 'wild-card' branch of the Israeli military, one that often leads to deadly situations. The settler does what even an Israeli soldier sometimes needs an excuse to do and, in fact, according to some, the settler becomes the excuse the Israeli soldier needs to kill.

There are many arguments as to the reason why the settler project condemned around the world continues to grow and expand under consecutive Israeli governments. The call to halt settlement expansion has come from all sides of the globe including Israel's main ally, the USA. Yet the settler movement is expanding at an alarming rate. Living in a village in the Salfit region of the West Bank I could see month by month the encroachment of the settlements on the villages of that region. Marda is a village under the shadow of the Ari'el Settlement and the mountain-side above the village is now a litter place for Ari'el. The villagers of Marda wake up daily to the stench of a rubbish dump on what was once a pristine mountain. A few miles on is the tragedy of the valley of Wadi Qana. The sewage from the settlement Imanuel, built in 1982 now poisons the river there and the orchards are dying. The villagers from Wadi Qana have been forced to leave their polluted valley and now inhabit the village of Deir Istya; itself decimated by Israeli settlements and now only a fraction of the size it once was.

'Security risk'

There is no end to telling the stories of how the settler project is slowly and systematically destroying the land and livelihood of the Palestinian farmers and villagers; but on another level the Israeli settlers are also proving to be a major factor in the violence perpetrated against the Palestinian people. In fact there is an argument that suggests the Israeli government masks its much more deadly goal of annihilating the Palestinian people behind the settler project.

Sharmine Narwani writes the following scenario in her argument that the settler movement is being used in this way:

'"Naatzi! Naaatzi!" This word, amazingly enough, is a settler favorite. "Nazis!" they screech at foreign TV crews, while waving their infants around. ''Nazi! Nazi! Natzi!'' they chant as they provocatively try to stop Palestinians from harvesting their olive crops. And the IDF soldiers wait and watch - occasionally intervening to push a frustrated and humiliated Palestinian objector away from a taunting, threatening Jewish settler.

Eventually, a half-crazed Palestinian will fight back, even kill some settlers. The Israeli authorities immediately step in and claim the "Security Risk" has increased and more Palestinian land has to be confiscated to ensure Israel's security. More Palestinians are detained, harassed, punished. More Palestinian homes are occupied or demolished. See how that works? Unleash your craziest settlers onto a Palestinian civilian population until someone blows a fuse and hits back. Then use that as the pretext to encroach further into the lives and onto the land of Palestinians.'

Sharmine continues by questioning the motive of the settler movement. If Israel continues to build the wall to 'protect' its civilians and is constantly invading, killing and imprisoning Palestinian people because of a 'security risk' then why 'would consecutive Israeli governments heavily subsidize and incentivize the relocation of young families - women and children - into hostile environments for no reason? Why would Israel - which claims security dangers wherever there are Palestinian populations - deliberately and systematically place its Jewish civilian population in "harm's way?"'

This is a valid question and to Western audiences who are used to the Israeli story hard to answer; infact the generally accepted view in the West is that the settlers are acting freely and the Israeli authorities cannot contain them. But Sharmine argues against this and having lived in the West Bank and dealt with settler violence on a number of occasions I can concur.

When a Palestinian reacts violently to intense provocation from an Israeli settler following a life of harassment by the IDF; the Israeli State steps in and imposes a week of 'terror' on the village of the 'militant' who initiated the violence. I have been in villages when this happened. They are subjected to night after night of sound bombs and tanks rolling around the streets. Random houses being invaded and the children and women made to stand in the dark, dogs unleashed and random machine gun fire. Half the young men of the village rounded up and taken to detention; some stuck in administrative detention for years. This is the consequence of an act of provoked violence of one Palestinian youth.

On the other hand the Israeli settler lives untouched by Israeli law and obviously out of reach of Palestinian law. Walking home from a non-violent demonstration against Israeli land confiscation near the village of Biddya I had a perfect example of this.
I was walking with the women folk and children back towards their village. We were being followed on all sides by Israeli forces, jeeps and soldiers equipped with their weapons of crowd control, which have proved to be deadly on a number of occasions. We were walking 100 meters from a settler road and I saw a truck driving around the bend. I watched in horror as the truck slowed down and then stopped and a settler opened the door and standing on the step of the truck pointed a machine gun at the crowd of women and children. I have never been so horrified as at that moment when I heard the gunfire and saw the women and children falling to the ground for protection. I remember not daring to look up from the ground where I had flung myself. When I did I saw women grabbing at children and hurrying toward their homes. I stood waiting to see if some woman or child would not rise but thankfully all did. Turning to the road I saw the soldiers had approached the truck. One had pushed the settler into the car seat and another had slammed his door and that was it. The truck drove off and the soldiers turned their focus back to the much greater threat of a group of young kids with their mothers walking home.

Sharmine's study has lead her to the 'chilling fact' that 'whichever way you slice and dice the data, settler violence is on the rise, and is consistent, systematic and happening in all governorates in 280 villages and locations across the West Bank. With no repercussions for the settlers who live under the Israeli penal code in a apartheid-system that separates them from the occupation and military laws to which Palestinians are subjected they can get quite literarily get away with murder.'

This means that the Israel government has two military forces. One 'legitimate' one recognized as one of the strongest militaries in the world financially supported and equipped by western powers, and one formed from the settler movement. The settler movement itself has two roles to play, the first is to occupy land and land-grab for Israel, the second is to provoke Palestinian violence that leads to more land grab and depopulation of Palestinian land; 'little by little, by invoking "security threats" resulting from Palestinian retaliation against settler attacks, Israel has made massive gains over the two decades since peace talks were launched.'

Who are the settlers?

The question you can't help asking when you are talking about this issue is what motivates the settlers themselves to choose this way of life? Who are they as people? I want to illustrate this question without suggesting answers because in the end it actually makes little difference. Whether the settlers are a majority of religious zealots, profiteers, uninformed followers or passive idealists they are a part of a force that is being used to destroy a whole country and the international community needs to step up the pressure to stop this.

In the south Hebron hills in the village of Al-Tuwani I remember standing every morning on a hill top waiting for the twelve children from a neighboring village to appear on the horizon. An Israeli jeep was also waiting for them and a bizarre procession would then follow. A jeep leading twelve little Palestinian children to school because their way lead them past the Israeli outpost of Havat Ma'on where a settler used to ambush the children, jumping at them from behind bushes and screeching obscenities at them. Rather than remove this crazed zealot the Israeli army chose to daily provide 'protection' to twelve Palestinian children travelling to and from school.

It was also in village of At-Tuwani that during my stay in Palestine a young American volunteering with the Christian Peacemakers Team was so severely bashed by a settler that he was hospitalized for weeks.

But on the other hand there is evidence of the 'blind' settler who lives their privileged life in the centre of the most unjust region of the world. One day I was picked up on my way to Al Quds by just such an Israeli woman. She told me that she had come out to Ari'el settlement with her husband from America maybe five years before. She had lived there and driven daily on the settlers roads and had given birth to two children and raised them as she may have had she remained in the US. Only one day she said she glanced through a wire mesh on the side of the road and saw a Palestinian village. It was close to Al Quds and was devastated by the beginning of Wall by settler roads and was surrounded by barbed wire. She said this was when her eyes were opened. She left the settlement and took her family to Tel Aviv and started working with various Israeli peace groups. She told me how guilty she felt for having lived with as she said 'blinkers on' for so many years.

It is not easy to make sense of the brutality of a part of the settler movement, particularly among the hill-top youths, or of the apparent blindness of the rest of the settlers to the reality of what they are doing to Palestine; but one thing is clear, that the settler project in the West Bank is one of the most serious issues today. The international community has voiced its concern over settlement expansion and Israel has ignored this. It remains to be seen how far the US will push its stance against settlement expansion in the upcoming peace talks; but even then settlement expansion is only a half of the problem. The existing settlements and their effect on the livelihood of Palestinians in the West Bank is the very real other side of the problem. The settler roads, the settler attacks on Palestinians, the settler theft of water sources and pollution of wells, the settler confiscation of land and occupation of Palestinian homes are all crimes that are going unnoticed by the West. It is hypocritical to say the least when the West preaches Mid-East peace talk progress and yet does not mention the existing settler problem except as something whose expansion has to halt. There can be no progress in any sort of peace talks without first dealing with reality on the ground. And the West has chosen up till now not to do this.

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Land swap will obliterate the Palestinians' case

1948 and Israel’s deceptive bargaining position

http://www.benwhite.org.uk/2010/08/20/1948-and-israels-deceptive-bargaining-position/

24 August 2010

The refrain from Israeli politicians and the country’s allies and apologists is familiar: There can be no peace deal until the Palestinians “recognize” Israel as “a Jewish state.” While this can sound reasonable to the casual listener in the West, this demand actually points to critical flaws in the “peace process” and the way in which the international community approaches the Palestine/Israel question.

This is because such a demand, and understanding why it is so unacceptable to Palestinians, means going back to 1948 – when hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages were destroyed, their inhabitants forbidden from returning by the new Jewish state — and throwing the spotlight on two groups of Palestinians that the so-called peace process has ignored or marginalized: the refugees of ‘48 (and their descendants) and the Palestinian minority that’s left inside Israel. The unpleasant reality is that Israel as “a Jewish state” means the permanent exile and dispossession of the former, and the colonial control of the latter.

In the West, even talking about Palestinian citizens inside Israel risks confusion, since for so long they have been referred to as “Israeli Arabs” or “Arab Israelis.” This is a formulation intended to obfuscate their Palestinian identity, a discursive erasure symbolic of far more brutal methods (some of which are described below). The lack of attention paid to the issues faced by Palestinians in Israel by Western politicians and pundits is unfortunate, since their historic and contemporary reality radically undermines the well-worn cliché that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East.”

The Palestinian minority (around 20 percent of the population) are those who managed to remain inside the Jewish state after the expulsions of 1948, events described in Arabic as al-Nakba, or “The Catastrophe.” With their society shattered — at least 85 percent of Palestinians in what became Israel were expelled — the minority was then subjected to military rule until 1966. This martial law combined with legislation passed in the Knesset to effect what is perhaps the defining dynamic in the relationship between the Jewish state and its Arab minority: land confiscation.

By the mid-1970s, the average Arab community inside Israel had lost between 65 and 75 percent of its land (see, for example, Ian Lustick’s 1980 study “Arabs in the Jewish State”). Policies that nowadays most people associate with Israel’s regime in the West Bank — seizure of Palestinian land in order to build Jewish settlements — have been routine inside Israel with regards to the Palestinian minority. Since 1948, around 1,000 Jewish communities have been created in Israel — but not one Arab town. Arab municipal communities make up 2.5 percent of state land, though the Palestinian minority has grown seven-fold.

The legislative and legal processes that the Israeli state implemented in order to expropriate the land of the Palestinian refugees also meant that some citizens — about one in four of the Palestinian minority — became known as “present absentees.” This means that their property was confiscated even though they remained in the borders of the new state. Meanwhile, across Israel, tens of thousands of citizens live in “unrecognized villages,” a result of planning and zoning by the state that categorized land as non-residential despite the presence of Arab villages. Many of these communities can be found in the Negev, where Bedouin Palestinians live unconnected to basic utilities, and at risk of home demolitions.

Just recently, the entire unrecognized village of al-Araqib was destroyed repeatedly, at the same time as the Israeli Knesset approved legislation intended to legalize and facilitate Jewish farms that had been established in the Negev. The context here, as well as in the Galilee, is the strategic aim of “Judaization”: increasing the Jewish presence in regions of the state deemed to have “too high” a proportion of Palestinian citizens. In the words of Haim Yacobi of Ben Gurion University, it is a “[project] driven by the Zionist premise that Israel is a territory and a state that ‘belongs’ to, and only to, the Jewish people.” Yeela Raanan, of the Regional Council for the Unrecognized Villages, surveyed the ruins of al-Araqib and said: “Redeeming the land is part of the Zionist project. Any land held or claimed by Arabs is a problem.”

A political party or movement that calls for more of the “right” people in a particular area because there are too many of the “wrong” people is rightly considered fanatical. Yet in Israel, this has been policy at a state and local level for over 60 years and it is part of mainstream discourse to talk of the Arab minority as an intrinsic “threat.” Netanyahu, as finance minister in 2003, described Palestinian citizens as a “demographic problem.” Last year, Israel’s housing minister declared it a “national duty” to “prevent the spread” of Palestinian citizens, since in the Galilee “populations that should not mix are spreading there.”

To document all the ways in which Israel’s regime of control keeps Palestinians as second-class citizens is beyond the scope of this article: It is far deeper and more systematic than the “complaints of discrimination” that the likes of the BBC and CNN tack on at the end of news items. Take “selection committees,” for example, which decide who gains admission to small communities based on criteria like “social suitability,” a setup that operates in hundreds of agricultural and community towns (over two-thirds of all the towns in Israel). Its use as a tool to exclude Palestinians has been made more explicit recently, with legislative efforts intended to “allow the rejection of Arab residences in small Jewish communities.”

This is only one of a recent rush of racist bills in the Knesset (the indispensable Adalah have also compiled a list of “10 Discriminatory Laws”). The same Knesset has stripped Arab MK Haneen Zoubi of parliamentary privileges, by way of punishing her for participating in the Gaza flotilla. Zoubi was almost physically assaulted in the chamber, as she faced cries of “Go to Gaza, traitor.” Other Palestinian members of the Knesset received an e-mail from MK Michael Ben-Ari announcing that “after we take care of her [Zoubi] it will be your turn.”

In Israel in 2010, human rights defenders are persecuted. Three months ago, Ameer Makhoul, director of Arab NGO network Ittijah, was snatched from his house in the night, and for almost two weeks, prevented from meeting his lawyers. A year before, Makhoul had been told by a Shin Bet agent (Israel’s domestic intelligence agency) that “next time” he will “have to say goodbye to his family since he will leave them for a long time.” In 2007, the Shin Bet confirmed they would “thwart” those who “harm” the Jewish character of the state, “even if such activity is sanctioned by the law.” As Makhoul’s wife, Janan Abdu, told me in Haifa recently, her husband had become well-known for what he has been saying about Israel — “the land regime, citizenship issues, what’s happening in the Negev, about the contradictions between being ‘Jewish’ and ‘democratic.’”

This is the question that many Western media outlets won’t touch, and most politicians dismiss with platitudes. The Palestinians in Israel are forgotten, particularly in terms of the international community’s peace process, despite — or realistically, because of — the way in which their struggles relate to what happened in 1948 and the meaning of creating a Jewish state in Palestine. This is the conversation that needs to take place, and increasingly is, from academia to activists. Talking with Haneen Zoubi at her home in Nazareth, the MK made an observation that needs heeding in Washington: “Israel’s treatment of its Palestinian minority is the more credible test of chances for a comprehensive peace.” So far, it doesn’t look good.