Under the cover of the two wars of 1948 and 1967, Israel was able to force more than one million Palestinians outside the territory it controlled. Unless there is another war, the opportunity to carry out another mass expulsion is unlikely to arise again, and as a result Israel is now carrying on slow ethnic cleansing through careful planning, rules and legislation, settlement expansion, separation walls, promises of land swaps and low intensity military operations that continue the 1948 Nakba. Israel has ignored the protests of the Arab and Islamic states, and it has used its powers as an occupier to create Greater Jerusalem and is now trying to achieve its vision of a Greater Israel. It is carrying on low intensity warfare that includes the siege and periodical decimation of the Palestinians in Gaza and the management of the occupation of the West Bank with help from the Palestinian Authority (PA). This status quo of a one-way peace seems acceptable to the Israeli people. To consolidate its control over the West Bank and Jerusalem, Israel has sought massive land annexations in Jerusalem. It has extended corridors of major settlement blocks deep into the West Bank, strategically severing Palestinian population clusters from one another. It has encircled East Jerusalem by building massive settlements and forcing Palestinians from their homes in droves. In the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military now routinely “mow the lawn”, an expression used by them to describe their assaults on the civilian infrastructure in attempts to batter the besieged population into submission. In its efforts to push Gaza's economy to the brink of collapse and starve its people, Israel has surrounded Gaza on three sides with sniper towers, electrified fences, concrete walls and a naval blockade. Weaponised drones fly overhead by day and at night. Contrary to Israel's professed claims of being a democratic state, laws have been pouring out of the Knesset that strengthen the Jewish character of Israel. These have been passed by overwhelming majorities of the Knesset and approved by the Israeli Supreme Court. The 2003 law on citizenship and entry into Israel, authored by Avraham Poraz, is one example. This not only bans West Bank Palestinians from obtaining citizenship if they marry Israeli citizens, but also disallows them from receiving even temporary residency. This law suggests that Israel considers every Arab Palestinian to be a threat to the security of the state simply because he or she is an Arab. The activities of West Bank and JerusalemIsraeli settlers have not been limited to the lands occupied in 1967. Instead, they have been expanding their anti-Arab and Judaisation activities to mixed Israeli cities and to the Negev. The US writer Max Blumenthal has given examples of the hardships suffered by Arab Israelis inside Israel proper. Groups of young Jewish fundamentalists storm through Arab neighbourhoods with impunity, he says, often carrying out pogroms. In May 2010, for example, young men waving Israeli flags burst into Arab homes in Jaffa chanting “this is our land,” “Jaffa is for the Jews,” and “Arabs, get out of Jaffa.” The following January, a similar group attacked the Al-Nuzha Mosque in Jaffa while chanting “Death to the Arabs” as the police stood impassively by, only intervening to prevent fighting between the attackers and men who had been praying in the mosque. Israeli rabbis, government officials and Knesset members all lead the assaults of such Jewish mobs against the Arab citizens of Israel. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the Israeli Shas Party leader who peppers his weekly radio sermons with invective against the Arabs, has said that “it is forbidden to be merciful to Arabs,” for example. While Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister of Israel whose party has gained more seats in the Knesset at every election, appeals to those who loathe the Arabs wherever they may be found. There are plans to pressure Palestinian Israelis to leave their homes, and Jewish leaders have no shame about insulting Arabs in public. The Jewish mayor of Ramle said of the Palestinians, for example, that “they [Arabs] are poor in culture”. The town of Lod was one of the 500 prosperous Palestinian towns or villages invaded and ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias in the 1948 War. In the Abu Touq neighbourhood of Lod, the few Arab families that managed to escape the cleansing of 1948 are now facing renewed cleansing today. These families live in a de facto refugee camp surrounded by exclusively Jewish communities. Many of their houses were also levelled in December 2010, leaving 74 people homeless including many children. These families then gathered whatever belongings they could salvage from their destroyed homes and pitched a few tents as their fellow Palestinians had done in the past. A sign on the encampment reads “Abu Eid Refugee Camp”. The Arabs of Lod have not been allowed to renovate their houses to accommodate their growing families, and they have not been allowed, as Arabs, to live in a new housing complex built in the city. Residents of the Abu Touq neighbourhood have been submitting applications to renovate their houses for years, but the Israeli authorities have always denied them the necessary permits. Meanwhile, building has begun on a yeshiva [Jewish religious school] undertaken by an Orthodox rabbi from the United States, Yaakov Saban. More than 30 homes had been demolished in Lod by the time the Abu Eid family homes were levelled. According to human rights reports, 42,000 Palestinian Israeli homes were demolished in the same period across Israel. In the Negev and Galilee, Israel has also ramped up its strategy of Judaisation, planting exclusively Jewish communities around and in place of Arab towns. In mixed cities, Israel has created pressure on the Arab inhabitants to move out from their homes. The latest victims of this have been the Bedouin of the Negev in southern Israel, where a campaign of ethnic cleansing has been underway. This is designed to remove the Bedouin from their ancestral lands to make way for the construction of Jews-only communities and a massive forestation project. Israel also plans to transform the Bedouin into workers to perform manual labour for the Jewish middle class. It has transferred many Bedouin into reservation-like communities overseen by the OR Movement, a group of West Bank settlers whose mission, besides colonising the West Bank, is to plant new Jewish towns in the Negev. Al-Araqib is a village in the Negev that was inhabited by the Bedouin long before the arrival of Jewish settlers in Palestine, but nevertheless it has now been levelled by the Israelis. The Bedouin had adopted the Palestinian non-violent resistance policy of steadfastness, but since July 2010 bulldozers have worked to wipe the village off the map. Farida Shaaban, a victim of the demolitions, described her situation to Blumenthal. “Our situation is worse than that of the people in Gaza. We witness injustice and demolitions on a daily basis, while in Gaza there is publicity, and they [the Gazans] are able to show the world what is happening there. Here, they don't show anybody what the Israelis are doing to us,” she said. The writer is a political analyst and author of Is the Two-State Solution Already Dead?
