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On 15th of May Palestinians worldwide will commemorate the ongoing Palestinian Nakba.
Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) are the largest and longest-standing case of displaced persons in the world today. There are at least 7.6 million displaced Palestinians including 360,000 IDPs in Israel, representing 66 percent of the entire Palestinian population (11.8 million) worldwide. Among them are 5.0 million who are registered with and assisted by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).
The Israeli regime of apartheid, military occupation, and colonization is not limited to the Palestinians living in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), but it also targets Palestinians residing on the Israeli side of the 1949 Armistice Line as well as those living in forced exile. Israel’s treatment of non-Jewish Palestinians throughout Israel and the oPt constitutes a comprehensive discriminatory regime aimed at controlling the maximum amount of land with the least number of indigenous Palestinians.
The main components of that structure discriminate against Palestinians in areas including nationality, citizenship, residency rights, and land ownership. Israel initially applied this system in 1948 in order to dominate and dispossess all forcibly displaced Palestinians, including the 150,000 who remained and who later became Palestinian citizens of Israel. After Israeli forces occupied the remaining part of Palestine in 1967, this territory became subject to the same Israeli regime in addition to military occupation. Israel’s settler-colonial regime was not necessitated by military expediency or broader national security concerns, to the contrary, its inception dates back to the beginnings of the Zionist Movement, decades before the creation of the State of Israel.
Zionist Movement
Zionist leaders established a movement in the late nineteenth century with the aim of creating a Jewish home through the formation of a, “…national movement for the return of the Jewish people to their homeland and the resumption of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel.”
As such, the Zionist enterprise combined Jewish nationalism, which it aimed to create and foster, with the colonial project of transplanting people, mostly from Europe, into Palestine drawing on the support of European imperial powers. The Zionist Movement constructed a specific global Jewish national identity in order to justify the colonization of Palestine. This identity had to be linked to Jewish presence in Palestine during the first century BC. Significantly, like all other national identities which are a modern concept, Jewish nationality cannot be traced back to a natural origin. Instead, groups of persons constructed nationality based upon their own self-perceptions and desires.
The task of establishing and maintaining a Jewish state on a predominantly non-Jewish territory has been completed by continuously forcibly displacing the land’s non-Jewish majority population alongside the implanting of the new Jewish settlers. Today, nearly seventy percent of the Palestinian people worldwide are themselves, or the descendants of, Palestinians who have been forcibly displaced by the Israeli regime.
Colonizing Palestine
The Zionist Movement, when setting the scene to colonize Palestine in 1897 under the motto, “people without land will get a land without people”, faced three major obstacles:
- The indigenous Palestinian people who were living in that territory;
- Palestinian property and land rights within that territory; and
- Lack of a sufficient number of Jewish people in that territory.
Overcoming these three obstacles necessitated a legal system able to maintain the newly established status quo in the aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The Zionist Movement, and later Israel, had no interest in simply creating a system of domination of one “racial” group over another. Rather, the intention was to establish a homogeneous Zionist-Jewish state predominantly for Jewish people.
Privileged Migration
To ensure a sufficient number of Jewish people in the colonized territory, Israel legislated the Law of Return (1950). It provides that every Jewish person in the world is entitled to Jewish nationality and can immigrate to Israel and acquire Israeli citizenship. Thus Jewish nationals enjoy the right to enter Israel even if they were not born in Israel and have no connection whatsoever to that state. In contrast, Palestinians, the indigenous population of the territory, are excluded from the Law of Return and have no automatic right to enter the country. The Law of Return has aimed to simplify and encourage the immigration of Jewish persons to Israel in order to achieve the exclusive Jewish state envisioned by Zionism.
Property Rights
Israel legislated and deployed the Absentee Property Law (1950) to confiscate Palestinian property legally owned by forcibly displaced Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons. The term “absentee” was defined so broadly as to include not only Palestinians who had fled the newly established State of Israel but also those who had fled their homes yet remained within its borders. Once confiscated, this land became State property.
Israel enacted the Land Acquisition Law (1953) to complete the transfer of confiscated Palestinian land, which had not been abandoned during the attacks of 1948, to the State. In the words of former Israeli Finance Minister Elilezer Kaplan, its purpose “…was to instill legality in some acts undertaken during and following the war.” An almost identical process took place in the oPt in the aftermath of the 1967 occupation.
Moreover, the expansion of existing Palestinian localities in Israel and the oPt has been severely curtailed as a result of Israel’s highly discriminatory planning policy. Since the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967, Israel has not permitted the establishment of any new Palestinian municipalities. Military Order 418 created a planning and building regime which gives full control of all areas related to planning and development in the oPt to the Israeli state.
Forced Population Transfer
The central obstacle to the Zionist Movement, the Palestinian people themselves, has been addressed by various means throughout the last decades. More than seven million Palestinians have been forcibly displaced – including their descendants- from their homes. Israeli laws such as the Prevention of Infiltration Law (1954) and Military Orders 1649 and 1650 have prohibited Palestinians from legally returning to Israel or the oPt.
Forced displacement of the indigenous Palestinian people did not end with the establishment of Israel in 1948, rather it began that year. Since the Nakba, almost every passing year has witnessed a wave of forced displacement, albeit varying in degree. While 400,000 Palestinians became refugees in 1967, in 2008, Israel revoked the residency rights of nearly 5,000 Palestinian Jerusalemites.
This population transfer is carried out today by Israel in the form of the overall policy of silent transfer. This displacement is silent in the sense that Israel carries it out while trying to avoid international attention, displacing small numbers of people on a weekly basis. It is to be distinguished from the more overt transfer achieved under the veneer of warfare in 1948.
Israel’s Silent Transfer Policy Today
The Israeli policy of silent transfer is evident in the State’s laws, policies and practices. Israel uses its power to discriminate, expropriate and ultimately effect the forcible displacement of the indigenous non-Jewish population from the area of Palestine. For instance, the Israeli land-planning and zoning system has forced 93,000 Palestinians in East-Jerusalem to build without proper construction permits because eighty-seven percent of that area is off-limits to Palestinian use; most of the remaining thirteen percent is already built up. Since the Palestinian population of Jerusalem is growing steadily, it has had to expand into areas not zoned for Palestinian residence by the State of Israel. All those homes are now under the constant threat of being demolished by the Israeli army or police, which will leave their inhabitants homeless and displaced.
Another example is the government-approved Prawer Plan, which calls for the forcible displacement of 70,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel due to an Israeli allocation policy, which has not recognized over thirty-five Palestinian villages located in the Naqab. Israel deems the inhabitants of those villages as illegal trespassers and squatters, and as such, they face the imminent threat of displacement. This is despite the fact that, in many cases, these communities predate the State of Israel itself.
The Israeli Supreme Court bolstered the Zionist objective of clearing Palestine of its indigenous population in its 2012 decision prohibiting family unification between Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and their counterparts across and beyond the 1949 Armistice Line. The effect of this ruling has been that Palestinians with different residency statuses, such as Israeli citizen, Jerusalem ID, West Bank ID or Gaza ID (all of which are issued by Israel), cannot legally live together on either side of the 1949 Armistice Line. They are thus faced with a choice of living abroad, living apart from one another, or taking the risk of living together illegally. This system aims to further diminish the Palestinian population. This demographic intention is reflected in the High Court’s explanation that “…human rights are not a prescription for national suicide.”
The Way forward
Israel's commission of internationally-sanctioned crimes, namely apartheid and colonization are intended to create an unbearable situation in order to drive the indigenous population out. This continuous and calculated strangulation of the Palestinian people must be properly challenged by the international community by codifying that state’s actions and policies into elements of an international crime against humanity. Israel's regime must be judged accordingly and its impunity must be brought to an end because the silence, if not complicity, of powerful members of the international community, in the face of practices and policies that violate fundamental rights and laws further entrenches politics, to the detriment of law.
