4 -10 April 2002
Issue No.580
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 4 -10 April 2002 Issue No.580 |
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Myths set in concrete
The 26th anniversary of Land Day last week underscored the very roots of the 54-year-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict, writes Amira Howeidy
"There is not one single place built in this country [Israel] that did not have a former Arab population."
-- Moshe Dayan, 1969In 1948, in British mandate Palestine, 95 per cent of what is now known as Israel was owned by Palestinians. Israel now owns 93 per cent of what were once Palestinian lands.
So when Israel's late defence minister and one of the country's founding fathers, Moshe Dayan, said the words quoted above, he was indeed telling the truth. His government was still conducting its vicious land-grab programme and continuing to expel Palestinians. According to some Israeli historians, Dayan's words are about expansionism -- in other words, transfer, the leitmotif of the Zionist programme.
To date, the Israeli government has passed 36 different laws and regulations, which when combined serve as a legal blanket to expropriate Palestinian Arab land. Although the indigenous people of Palestine are today left with only three per cent of the land, Israel is still pursuing its attempts to confiscate even this small fraction.
Last Saturday, 30 March, was the 26th anniversary of Land Day. On this day, Palestinians everywhere commemorate the first time that Palestinian citizens of Israel protested against plans to expropriate Arab land.
On 30 March 1976, the Israeli government tried to take over 60,000 dunums of Arab- owned land in Galilee to build new Jewish colonies and expand existing Jewish cities. In the resulting confrontation with the police, six Palestinians were killed, hundreds wounded and hundreds jailed.
The suffering attracted the attention of Arabs outside the Israeli state. It was perhaps the first time that Palestinians living outside the Green Line (the unofficial Israeli borders before 1967 war) and those in the diaspora, in addition to the people of other Arab country, began to realise that those oddly labelled people known as "Israeli- Arabs" were no longer to be viewed with suspicion. It also helped expose Israel's racism and its discriminatory policies towards the Palestinian minority, which makes up approximately 19 per cent of the total population.
This year, dozens of civil rights groups and Arab and Muslim organisations in the US, Europe and the Arab world came out in unprecedented numbers to mark Land Day's 26th anniversary. It is the first time in its history that the event has been commemorated outside Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Some have attributed the unprecedented attention to an increased awareness of the Palestinian question resulting from the 18- month-long Intifada.
Back in the occupied Palestinian territories, however, it came as no surprise that scheduled activities could not proceed due to Israel's military assault and reoccupation of Palestinian population centres. Elsewhere -- in the Negev, Washington, London, Beirut and Cairo -- activities went ahead but were overshadowed by Israel's new war on the Palestinians. In many ways, 30 March this year marked more than just land seizure. It was also a way to support the Intifada and express solidarity with the Palestinians.
The struggle to regain land, however, proceeds only at a snail's pace. Despite the existence of several organisations and legal groups which document seizures and take legal action to combat land grabbing and preserve the rights of the Palestinian minority, there is a long way to go before retrieving confiscated land.
"It's not about questioning of the constitutionality of the [confiscation] laws," Mohamed Zeidan, director of the Nazareth-based Arab Association for Human Rights (AAHR), told Al- Ahram Weekly. "It's about contesting the formative myths of the state of Israel, which constitute the collective consciousness of the Israeli people. We have a long way to go before we can do that."
According to a report issued recently by BADIL, a centre for Palestinian residency and refugee rights in Bethlehem, Israel has continued to dispossess "and violate the basic human right to property" of the Palestinian population in the period since Land Day last year. Inside Israel proper, the report said, the government has demolished Palestinian homes in numerous villages and towns including Katamat, Al-Bean'ana, Al- Kbasi, Deir Al-Assad, Al-Hussainiya, Majd Al- Krum, Al-Khalid, Jisr Al-Zarqa, Ramle, Iballin, and Lydda. "Land continues to be expropriated for a new trans-Israel highway that will further divide Palestinians inside Israel into isolated and discontiguous geographic zones," BADIL warned.
Over the past year, according to the report, the Israel Land Administration (ILA) department continued to damage cemeteries, mosques and churches in depopulated Palestinian villages, and to destroy crops planted by the Bedouin in the Negev.
On the eve of the 26th anniversary of Land Day itself, BADIL revealed ILA plans to expropriate 13,000 dunums of Palestinian land near the Palestinian town of Shafr Amr to establish a nature reserve and national park.
The report also documented expropriation of land and damage to property in the occupied Palestinian territories. About 30 Palestinian homes were demolished in East Jerusalem in 2001, with hundreds more in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Since the beginning of the Intifada, BADIL estimates that Israel has demolished more than 500 shelters in Palestinian refugee camps alone. Thousands of Palestinian homes in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been damaged.
Furthermore, during Israel's last military assault on Palestinian refugee camps at the beginning of March, at least 1,800 refugee shelters were damaged. Between 29 September 2000 and the end of February 2002, Israel bulldozed more than 32,000 dunums of Palestinian land, uprooted nearly half a million trees and demolished more than 200 Palestinian farmers' homes.
The issue of expropriated land and Palestinian rights is also associated with the return of refugees, whether the internally displaced (250,000) or those in the Palestinian diaspora (five million). That, too, is another taboo subject in Israel, another myth related to the "purity" of the Jewish state.
"We realise that the return of the refugees, including the internally displaced, is a political issue," said Soliman Fahmawi, spokesman of the Internally Displaced Society, an organisation which deals with Palestinians who live inside Israel and in the occupied territories but are not allowed to return to their villages, which Israel destroyed in 1948.
The near-impossibility of retrieving the land or calling for the return of the refugees has not stopped these various organisations from pursuing their activities in documenting and exposing the human rights violations and fighting endless legal battles.
The road ahead is long, says AAHR's Zeidan, "but we've succeeded in making our voices heard." The world conference against racism that took place in Durban last September, for example, "served as a kick-start for us, Arab citizens in Israel, in forming good relations with the West." It is Zeidan's belief that their cause will not achieve significant progress without building bridges with the West and, of course, working in Israel to change a collective national consciousness that is based, in his words, on a "demographic ghetto."
Counting the dispossessed
Since 1948 Israel has expropriated more than 17 million dunums (17,000 sq km) of land owned by Palestinian refugees and nearly 1 million dunums owned by Palestinians inside Israel. Additionally, it has expropriated and/or controls some 4.7 million dunums in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, which it took over in 1967. In 1948, Palestinians owned more than 90 per cent of the land in historic Mandate Palestine. Today, the indigenous Palestinian Arab population owns and controls just over 10 per cent of the land within the borders of their historic homeland (i.e. inside Israel and the 1967 occupied territories). At the same time, more than half of the indigenous Palestinian population has been displaced or expelled to areas outside the borders of the their historic homeland. A total of three-quarters of the indigenous Palestinian population are displaced either outside or inside their homeland.
Source: BADIL, the resource centre for Palestinian residency and refugee rights
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