Along with the occupation and its ugliness, the State of Israel also persecutes Palestinians who remained within its created borders in 1948, though the world often forgets them, writes Nayef Hawatmeh* In his notorious interview with Ari Shavit in Haaretz on 9 January 2004, Israeli historian Benny Morris said: "If the end of the story turns out to be a gloomy one for the Jews, it will be because Ben- Gurion did not complete the transfer in 1948. Because he left a large and volatile demographic reserve in the West Bank and Gaza and within Israel itself." He adds, in answer to a subsequent question: "The Israeli Arabs are a time bomb. Their slide into complete Palestinisation has made them an emissary of the enemy that is among us. They are a potential fifth column. In both demographic and security terms they are liable to undermine the state. So that if Israel again finds itself in a situation of existential threat, as in 1948, it may be forced to act as it did then ... If the threat to Israel is existential, expulsion will be justified." The blatant immorality of this position aside, Benny Morris has cast into relief the Israeli attitude towards the Palestinians who managed to remain in the territories occupied in 1948 and who are viewed as a threat to Israel's self- accorded right to preserve its character as a "Jewish state". The threat of the 1948 Palestinians, from the Israeli Zionist perspective, resides in their attempts to preserve their distinct national identity. This they have succeeded in doing to great effect over the past 56 years by focussing their struggle on the right of national equality in "a state for all its citizens". The Zionists are also alarmed with the so-called Palestinian demographic bomb. According to the annual report of the Israeli census bureau in 2002, the annual population growth of 1948 Palestinians is 3.4 per cent as opposed to 1.4 per cent for the Jews, while net Jewish immigration that year was down 23 per cent from the previous year. Israeli plans to dilute and reduce the national identity of Palestinians were clear from the moment the State of Israel was established at the expense of Palestinian historic and national rights. More than a million square dunams of land was confiscated from Arab villages within the 1948 borders of Israel, in addition to the Negev, through a series of laws and military decrees, some of which prohibited Palestinians from construction to accommodate the natural expansion of their towns and villages. Such practices would inevitably lead to the confrontation that culminated on 30 March 1976. However, what immediately sparked the Land Day uprising was the Ministry of Finance decision of 29 February 1976 to confiscate 21,000 dunams of Palestinian land in Galilee. These vast tracts of land were to be turned over to the construction of eight Jewish industrial villages, in implementation of the so-called Galilee Development Plan of 1975. In hailing this plan, the Ministry of Agriculture openly declared that its primary purpose was to alter the demographic nature of Galilee in order to create a Jewish majority in the area. Nothing could have more succinctly exposed the flagrantly racist designs of successive Israeli governments against the Palestinians of 1948. The policies of these governments aimed at the systematic eradication of Palestinian society and the destruction of its largely agrarian economic infrastructure. Extensive land and property confiscation, prevention of natural urban expansion, prevention of the development of urban infrastructure and public services and the inevitable transformation of the Palestinian labour force into wage earners servicing the Israeli menial labour market were all intended to accomplish this aim. They had the opposite effect. The gross injustices gave shape to an independent and dynamic national identity and galvanised its adherents into fighting for their right to equality with Israeli Jews. The survival of a cohesive societal structure that projects a distinct national identity and produces a unique culture is contingent upon the stability and continuity of its relationship with the territory of the nation. The expropriation of the land that had remained in the possession of the Arabs of 1948 thus undermined the foundations of their national cohesion and identity and effectively abnegated their full rights of citizenship. In other words, the Palestinian Israelis were reduced to second-class citizens whose status approximated that of resident foreigners, in that they had the right of residency without the rights of property ownership, although even that right was precarious. Israeli plans up to 2020 will tighten the stranglehold on Palestinian towns and villages in Galilee, the Triangle, the Negev and the Palestinian coast. These towns and villages are not on the list of beneficiaries of development projects and most of the local Arab municipalities do not have the funding to provide essential public services, as has been reflected in the declining standards of education, health and other services. As a result, a large number of local Arab municipalities face collapse while their Jewish counterparts are receiving increasing amounts of aid and support every year with the aim of completing the Judaisation of Palestinian territories. The situation is such that many Palestinian municipalities have no alternative but to subsume themselves under the framework of Jewish municipalities. This transformation of autonomous Palestinian towns and villages into isolated quarters within totally Judaised administrative areas is part of the process of dismantling the internal structure of Palestinian society and destroying a fundamental prerequisite for the cohesion of its national identity. Another manifestation of Israeli governments' attitudes towards Palestinians is their aggressive drive to promote Jewish immigration to Israel in accordance with the Law of Return while refusing to so much as contemplate a solution to the plight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were forced to flee from their homes to other areas inside Israel. We note, for example, that Israeli authorities refused to abide by the court rulings in favour of the return of Israeli Palestinians to their native villages of Ifrat and Kafr Baram and that judicial rulings sanctioning urban expansion of existing Palestinian communities were obstructed by military decrees. That the emergency laws, as evidenced, are applied exclusively to Israeli Palestinians is indicative of the state of war Israel has declared against them with the ultimate aim of dispossessing them entirely. Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has steadfastly refused to subscribe to the principle of the secular state (the separation between the state and religious affiliation), having based its very existence on being a "democratic Jewish state". The emphasis, moreover, has always been on "Jewishness of the state", which inherently abnegates the right of its Palestinian minority to national equality in keeping with the principle of the "democratic" component of that formula. But then, equality would invalidate the panoply of emergency laws and military decrees that permitted the expropriation of Palestinian land and it would confer upon Palestinians equal rights to national expression as guaranteed for Israeli Jews. Perhaps one day such equality will be realised, perhaps by force of demographic developments, and Israel will be transformed into a bi-national state -- secular and equal for all its citizens. In the meantime, Israel has found another useful mechanism for dealing with the Palestinians of 1948, which is to treat Palestinian society as a composite of distinct ethnic and religious entities. Israel thus divides the Palestinians into Arabs (Muslims and Christians), Druze, Bedouins and Circassians. Obligatory military service, for example, is applied only to the Druze and Bedouins. In breaking down the Palestinian minority into separate ethnic or denominational entities that need to be assimilated into "Israeli society", Israel is attempting to strike another blow to the unity and distinctness of the national identity of the Palestinians of 1948. Israel's current ultra-right government saw in the 11 September 2001 attacks on the US the opportunity to push its racist policies against the Palestinians of 1948 to a level of fanaticism that has threatened their rights, indeed their very existence, as never before. One of the most ominous signs of the success of these policies emerged from the Aqaba Summit of 4 June 2003. In his speech at the conclusion of that summit, Mahmoud Abbas, then Palestinian Authority (PA) prime minister, acknowledged Israel's "right" to preserve its character as a "Jewish state". This curious position on the part of a Palestinian leader is very dangerous in that it openly sanctions Israel's "right" to continue its persecution of Palestinians inside Israel and gives impetus to the prospect of transfer and expulsion espoused by the Israeli extreme right and expounded by Benny Morris in his Haaretz interview. Not long afterwards, the Geneva Accord of 3 December 2003 augmented the peril with its presumption that the Palestinians would accept the principle of territorial exchange. The Sharon government was quick to seize upon this hypothetical acceptance as the basis for his proposal for a land exchange that would permit the annexation to Israel of the major Israeli settlement areas around Jerusalem and large tracts of the West Bank. The readiness with which some PA leaders are willing to accommodate the Israeli vision for a solution by conceding on international resolutions that are intended to secure the minimal level of Palestinian rights, and even by making further concessions behind the back of the Palestinian Intifada and without a Palestinian mandate, has gravely jeopardised the position of Palestinians inside Israel and their fight to preserve their national identity, their rights to the land and their right to equal national expression in a democratic state. Furthermore, the unilateral behaviour on the part of some members of the PA undermines the mutually supportive relationship between Palestinians inside Israel and Palestinians in the occupied territories and the diaspora, visible testimony to which is the spread of protest demonstrations from Araba, Sakhnin and Kufr Kana to Jerusalem, Ramallah, Hebron and the refugee camps abroad. Today, against the mounting challenges they face, the Palestinians of 1948 must stand united as never before to obstruct the designs to rob them of their distinct identity and to expel them once again. They must have the support of all Palestinians outside Israel. In addition, there must be a halt to all attempts to barter away their rights as occurred in Aqaba and in the Geneva Initiative. Palestinians inside Israel already have had enough to contend with vis-à-vis their 56-year-old resistance against the systematic attrition of their land and identity. * The writer is the secretary-general of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestinian (DFLP).
