Monday
Feb062017
I've Never Lived in a Stolen Home. Maybe Leaving It Is Harder
Monday, February 6, 2017 at 11:22PM http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.769051
From Umm al-Hiran to Amona, the comparison shrieked to the skies: apartheid police. One police for whites and one police for natives.
by Gideon Levy 3 February 2017 Haaretz
Pro-settlement activists scuffle with Israeli police during an operation by Israeli police to evict residents from Israeli settler outpost of Amona in the occupied West Bank February 1, 2017. RONEN ZVULUN/REUTERS
Once, I moved house. It was sad. It was sad to part from the walls and the memories. The sorrow passed. I got over it. I am not alone: A lot of people have moved home, some because they wanted to, others not: because of a contract that expired, a relationship that fell apart or a new job.
It’s always sad to leave home, though not every such departure features (ostensibly) heart-wrenching articles, phony assertions, utterly incredible cries for national compassion and scandalous compensation. It doesn’t always take eight Israeli army battalions and 3,000 policemen to move a person from what had been his home.
On second thought, I've never lived in a stolen home. Maybe leaving it is harder.
On Wednesday the Amona Show arrived at its last act. More than anything else, the illegal outpost’s evacuation proved how racist the Israeli police are. It seems that people can be evacuated using bare hands, without need for rifles or helmets, without truncheons and mainly, without the discourtesy and penchant for violence that the police and border police have demonstrated when facing the weak, Arabs or Ethiopians. Suddenly the demonstrators are not shot with live fire. It was not the police who swept into Amona, but “Salvation Army” soldiers in blue jackets with an Israeli flag sewn to the sleeve.
Why? Because the evacuees are white Jews, representatives of the most privileged, most powerful group in Israeli society. Because the chief of police hails from the same neighborhood. Because the government didn’t want heart-rending pictures to start making the rounds.
Bedouin women react to the destruction of houses on January 18, 2017 in the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran, which is not recognized by the Israeli government, near Beersheba. MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP
From Umm al-Hiran to Amona, the comparison shrieked to the skies: apartheid police. One police for whites and one police for natives. It can no longer be denied.
Israeli police mobilise on the second day of an operation to evict residents from the West Bank settler outpost of Amona where hardline settlers are barricading themselves on February 2, 2017.THOMAS COEX/AFP
The evacuation of Amona proceeded after foreplay that dragged on and on, including the usual repertoire of schticks, featuring endless hearings in the High Court of Justice, sitting as an especially incongruous Purim-costumed version of a state with justice and equality before the law, including the justices playing dumb, the young girls in braids and tears, the young mothers with babies, the guitars, the prayers, candles and all that tired jazz. The cries of “wickedness” and “discrimination” and “Citizens type B,” the little girl asking her mother, in front of rolling cameras of course, “Mommy, will we have somewhere to live?” as though she didn’t know the answer.
The army that cordons off the area but allows hundreds of youngsters to freely infiltrate, barricading themselves inside homes while vowing to eschew violence; the soldiers demonstrating their sensitivity as they prepare for action – any moment now they’ll be bursting into tears; the nauseating headlines – “This was my home,” “The final hours”; the Palestinian landowners for whose benefit this show has been put on, who will never be allowed to get anywhere near their land, now evacuated; the childish name chosen for this mission – “Locked kindergarten” [from the song based on Rachel’s poem, “It’s not nice to see the kindergarten locked”] – how very poetic and moving. And, of course, the appropriate Zionist reaction, without which no eviction could possibly proceed – build another 1,000 housing units, and counting.
The music never stops – until it does, and the Amona Show is going to be the last one. The eviction season is over. The pretending is over. Barring something unexpected happening in Washington, we can forget this theater of the absurd, this evacuation sample, in which – for a moment there – Israel wraps itself in the image of a state of law and order, moves out a handful of settlers who occupied land “illegally” – bad lot, those settlers – as though there was a single settlement in the land that conducted itself legally, and in their stead is instating another thousand people on land that is just as stolen. But now annexation is approaching, the arrangement is nigh, the masked ball is winding down, and following it will come the hangover of the settlers’ triumph.
Few Israelis have ever visited Amona. Most have no idea where it is. Presumably, few care about its fate. Even after all the tear-jerking, Amona did not touch the hearts of the secular community. Yet ironically it is Amona where the independence of the state of settlers has been declared. It is this inane eviction that attests to their grand victory. There will be no more Amonas. It was the National Theater’s last show.
Gideon Levy
Haaretz Correspondent
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Analysis Demolition of Bedouin Town Destroyed Israeli Arabs' Faith in State
The situation really worries the 1.5 million citizens determined to remain on their lands and in their homeland. But it should be of no less concern to anyone who seeks to live a normal life in the State of Israel.
by Jack Khoury 19 January 2017 Haaretz
Arab Israeli lawmaker from the Joint Arab List, Ayman Odeh (front row C), wounded during clashes, stands with other Arab Israeli politicians in Umm Al-Hiran, a Bedouin village in Israel's southern Neg AMMAR AWAD/REUTERS
The announcement by Israel’s Higher Arab Monitoring Committee of actions it is planning in response to the demolitions in Umm al-Hiran Wednesday and the killing of Yakub Abu al-Kiyan was expected, the intended measure familiar from previous incidents — general strikes in Arab communities, a march in Wadi Ara and a convoy from Kalansua to the Knesset. It is the announcement’s last two, additional items that point to the depth of the crisis between Israel’s Arab community and state institutions.
The first is a call for schools to devote the first two hours of classes today to a discussion about the incident in Umm al-Hiran, the demolition of homes in Kalansua last week and the housing crisis in the country’s Arab communities. The second calls on the international community to provide protection to Israel’s Arab minority in the face of what the committee calls “the increased aggression of state institutions against Arab citizens at the clear instruction of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and with the support of his government.”
Residents prevented from entering the village of Umm al Hiran, January 18, 2017. Eliyahu Hershkovitz
It’s hard to estimate how many principals and teachers who are governed by the Education Ministry, which is headed by Naftali Bennett, will respond to the committee’s initiative and how many will dare allow themselves and their students to conduct a deep and serious discussion of these burning issues.
Violent clashes between police forces and residents in Umm al-Hiran, January 18, 2017
The Higher Arab Monitoring Committee was responsive to the criticism in Arab society of the decision to suspend classes following the demolitions in Kalansua. This time, rather than send the students to the streets and perhaps endanger them in superfluous clashes, the committee changed its approach. This time they will teach how the government of Israel and its prime minister, under pressure from the education minister, worked tirelessly to find a solution, in the name of the law, for the land thieves in Amona, but in Umm al-Hiran and Kalansua chose to demolish and destroy, in the name of the same law. This is food for thought for Arab society’s next generation, a lesson in the state’s attitude to one-fifth of its citizens, who are shoved to the margins just because they are Arabs.
Nor does anyone believe that the call to the world will be effective, certainly not in the near term. The United Nations, the European Union, Russian President Vladmir Putin or even the symbol of the new era, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, are not going to bring salvation. But this call expresses the clear lack of confidence the Arabs have in those meant to be responsible for protecting them as citizens — the government, the Knesset, the Supreme Court and the media. Even the hope that some had pinned on peace groups and nonprofits that advocate for coexistence has been dashed under the bulldozers’ treads.
This situation really worries the 1.5 million citizens determined to remain on their lands and in their homeland, both the parents who don’t want their children to take to the streets, and young people who aspire to integrate. But it should be of no less concern to anyone who calls himself a democrat and a liberal, and who seeks to live a normal life in the State of Israel.
This week there was a lot of talk of the campaign by former generals trying to scare people with the threat of an Arab majority by calling for separation from the Palestinians to preserve the character of the state. Given the events of the past several days, it seems that in the Netanyahu era, the battle is not for the state’s character, but for its sanity.
Jack Khoury
Haaretz Correspondent
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