by Noura Erakat [http://www.mecaforpeace.org/
Palestinian-Israeli negotiations have intensified<http://www.jpost.
To the contrary, at a recent talk delivered at Bar Ilan University<http://www.
The hawkish leader's analysis is contingent on the belief that Palestinians are not rational actors, but emotional ones impervious to reason. Netanyahu's analysis is fundamentally racist and flawed because itascribes to Jewish immigration into Mandatory Palestine an innocuous character it has never possessed.
Israel's establishment as a homeland for a Jewish majority in a land where a Palestinian-Arab majority existed has necessitated the on-going forced removal and subjugation of the non-Jewish Palestinian population - not simply in the Arab-Israeli War or the Six-Day War, but into the present day.
Forced into ghettoised communities
Today, there are 6.8 million Palestinian refugees. These are people who fled the war and the threat of harm in 1948 - the Nakba - and 1967, and their descendants. Yet the travails of Palestinians are by no means finished. Israel's present-day administrative practices in housing, residency, water distribution, urban planning, education, and taxation policies are herding Palestinians into ghettoised communities or forcing them from the territory altogether.
Within Israel, Palestinians are squeezed into designated areas or urban townships, as is the case with the 70,000 Palestinian bedouin<http://adalah.org/eng/
Surrounding the concentrated and disconnected West Bank population centres is an intricate network of Jewish settler colonies, with the attendant physical and economic infrastructure, and whose residents are subject to a different set of laws designated for Jewish persons only with the intention - and result - of privileging them legally, administratively, economically, and politically.
Still, this apartheid reality is not the worst-case scenario for Palestinians, many of whom insist that, come what may, they will never be forced out again.
Endorsing apartheid
Yet notwithstanding the courageous Palestinian determination to stay rooted to what land remains to them, Israel is pressuring thousands of Palestinians out of the territory and into forced exile along with those already removed since 1948. Between 1967 and 1994, Israel revoked the residency rights of approximately140,000<http://
Within Israel, the ban on family reunification<http://adalah.
The intended purpose of Israeli laws, policies, and decrees within the state, as well as the Occupied Territories, is to diminish the Palestinian population. Under international law, this policy amounts to forced population transfer. In common speech, it is ethnic cleansing - sometimes by Israeli military might and sometimes via the law.
It is in this context that Netanyahu proclaimed in his Bar Ilan address: "We will not be satisfied with recognition of the Israeli people or of some kind of bi-national state which will later be flooded by refugees<http://www.
Palestinians officially recognised<http://unispal.un.
Israeli vs Jewish
To date, a bifurcation<http://www.
In effect, a Jewish national (as defined by Israeli law) residing in London with no relationship to the state is entitled to more state benefits and protection than a Palestinian-Israeli citizen in Nazareth whose family lineage in the area dates back centuries.
A group of Jewish-Israelis concerned with this structural discrimination recently filed a petition to the Israeli High Court of Justice seeking recognition for an Israeli people rather than a Jewish one<http://www.haaretz.com/
Some Israelis, like those who comprise the NGO Zochrot<http://www.zochrot.
The NGO Monitor, an Israeli organisation incensed by the proposition of equality, has launched a campaign against Zochrot by targeting its European government funders<http://www.ngo-
To an outside observer brought up on the merit of equal rights, the conditions to which Palestinians are subject are cause for indignation rather than the irrational hatred voiced by Netanyahu. Significantly, these conditions are the fruit of power, privilege, and politics and they can be remedied by affording equality, justice, and dignity for all. US taxpayers would be better off investing in these ideals rather then in an apartheid regime, which they are helping to make more durable.
Noura Erakat is a Palestinian human rights attorney and is currently an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.
Little joy in West Bank as 26 Palestinian prisoners return home
By Amira Hass<http://www.haaretz.com/
The noise in recent days from the Israeli lobby against the release of Palestinian prisoners<http://www.haaretz.
The official spokesmen were asking once again that this be depicted as a big achievement for the PA, especially for President Mahmoud Abbas - another step on the way to ending the occupation. But the masses' general apathy hasn't waned.
There were a number of reasons. The natural joy over the release of 26 longtime prisoners doesn't change the fact that the Palestinians are troubled by an abundance of problems that touch every family and individual. And everyone knows that these problems aren't about to be solved.
Here are some examples: the fate of the Palestinian refugees who remain in Syria or are among the more than two million people who have been displaced; Israel's success in ignoring the international position and continuing to build in the settlements and expropriate land; the dangersawaiting olive pickers and farmers<http://www.haaretz.
Another reason for the absence of rejoicing was the broad opposition to relaunching the peace talks with Israel under the continued construction in the settlements and the large doubts about the talks' results. Even those who supported a relaunch of the negotiations<http://www.
Some people even think that this was a too high a price for giving up on the aggressive diplomatic channel at the United Nations - but they can't say it in public. They don't want to create the impression that the fate of the prisoners and the pain of their families aren't important to them. (Hamas managed to cover up the very high price - in human life, wounded and economic damage - that the Palestinians paid for the release of the prisoners in the Gilad Shalit<http://www.haaretz.com/
And another reason: The releases at the beginning of the Oslo process<http://www.haaretz.
Just this Monday, soldiers in Hebron arrested two more members of the Palestinian Legislative Council from the Hamas Change and Reform slate in the West Bank: Nizar Ramadan, 53, and Mohammed Bader, 55. In doing so the number of legislative council members jailed in Israel reached 15 - nine of whom are under extended administrative detention.
Also Monday, another 20 or so Palestinians were arrested throughout the West Bank, including students from Hebron and Nablus. The Israeli policy of arrests is seen as part of the apparatus of regular repression - institutionalized and planned - that is inherent to a foreign ruler that imposes itself on a population. The release of a few prisoners does not signal a change in the Israeli approach.
Amid the apathy concerning the prisoners, the PA is trying to revive the issue abroad. On Sunday, in South Africa's Robben Island prison - which has been converted into a museum - in the same cell where Nelson Mandela was held, the "Free Marwan Barghouti and All Palestinian Political Prisoners" international campaign was launched. (The word order is first Barghouti and then all the prisoners.)
Representatives of Fatah, the PA and Palestinian human rights groups came to South Africa for the launch of the campaign, along with Barghouti's wife Fadwa Barghouti. On hand were members of the African National Congress, and at the head of the group was Ahmed Kathadra, the 84-year-old former prisoner who served 26 years of a life sentence and hard labor handed down during the apartheid era. Mandela, Kathadra and many others had committed the crime of belonging to the African National Congress' military wing.
The campaign is conveying: Just as South African prisoners who were opponents of apartheid were released as negotiations were under way (and even before they were officially under way), the Palestinian prisoners must be released. In today's Israel there's a kind of apartheid similar to what prevailed in those days in South Africa. And Barghouti is the Mandela of the Palestinians who must be released to advance the negotiations for change.
Abroad this may sound good, but it's another reason for the Palestinians who have stayed home not to celebrate. Their doubts about their leaders both inside and outside the prisons runs very deep.
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