Palestinians should drag architects of settlements to the ICC – Amira Hass

Feb 19, 2021

The following article was published in Ha’aretz on February 16th 2021

Their fingerprints are on every square centimeter, their expertise and professionalism in every bend in the road. They are the planners, architects and contractors who are turning the West Bank into an Israeli-Jewish district: a mix of upscale towns and neighborhoods in the style of Ramat Hasharon and Savyon combined with the Tower and Stockade Zionist communities of the 1930s, Wild West-style ranches, New Jersey-style suburbs and roofs like Swiss chalets. Prestigious living at reasonable prices for Jews only. And on Palestinian land, at the expense of the Palestinian freedom of choice, development and future.

The Israeli planners and developers are the first to benefit from the theft of land and water carried out by various Israeli authorities and whitewashed by jurists and judges. My advice to the Palestinians would be to focus on them. Publicly submit their names to the International Criminal Court in The Hague along with their (alleged, alleged) crimes.

Far-sighted Israeli planning has turned Palestinian villages and shepherds’ encampments into distant, Orientalist décor within an Israeli space. The Palestinian cities have been hidden behind walls, checkpoints, barbed-wire fences and warning signs. Here and there, the Jewish motorist on a bypass road catches a glimpse of the Third World – gray concrete, industrial buildings in the middle of residential neighborhoods, homes in the middle of industrial zones, a congested architectural jumble that is devoid of greenery; water tanks on every roof and high-rise apartments built without planning permits, abutting one another.

Upper Israel in an increasingly Jewish space, Lower Palestine made of a patchwork of enclaves, scattered and cut off from one another. There is a convenient and ever-expanding network of highways – on land stolen from the Palestinians, and off limits to them – providing natural, unimpeded access to Israel’s cities. Closed iron gates ensure that the distance between one Palestinian enclave and another is increasing and that traveling between them is becoming more and more complicated and discouraging.

This is not accidental. Thousands of Jewish Israelis, graduates of architecture and engineering departments in Israeli universities, are partners in this wonder of apartheid. When the ICC prepares the lists of suspects and those to be investigated, their unique contribution (allegedly, allegedly) to the commission of the crimes described in sections 1(d) and 1(j) of Article 7 (Crimes against Humanity) and Article 8 section 2(b)(viii) (War Crimes) of the Rome Statute creating the court must not be forgotten.

These provisions relate to apartheid, the expulsion of an occupied population from their place of residence and the transfer of the population of the occupying country to the occupied territory, directly or indirectly. The three crimes – expulsion, settlement and apartheid – feed, enable and strengthen one another.

There is an understandable Palestinian political, emotional and national need to see Israeli politicians, army brass, officers and soldiers brought to trail for their attacks in 2014 and subsequently against civilian population in the Gaza Strip, and for having killed and maimed thousands of children, unarmed young men, women and the elderly. But there is no doubt that the seasoned lawyers whom Israel will hire to defend them will come up with dozens of tricks to avoid disclosing the identities of those who committed them, dragging the matter out for years and turning the process into a vengeful saga against the Hamas authorities in Gaza.

The crimes and the suspects must be selected from places where Israel cannot make the Palestinians the guilty party. How would the planners and contractors respond when asked why they built a neighborhood exclusively for Jews on the land of a Palestinian village? That they were just following orders? Their bank accounts will prove that they committed crimes of apartheid in return for cash.

A Palestinian focus on the planners and builders of the settlement enterprise would put a decades-old system based on the principle of unequal development on trial and expose the collaboration of Israel’s civilians in its creation. That would also make it possible to deter new planners and builders, who will heed the following warning: You and the jurists who gave a stamp of approval to the system and the crimes will find yourselves on the list of defendants, charged and convicted in The Hague.

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Jewish National Fund for Apartheid – Gideon Levy

Feb 19, 2021

The following article was published in Ha’aretz, February 18th 2021

Meet the Zionism of 2021: “Redeeming” land by the Jewish National Fund in the West Bank, “redeeming land” in the Galilee too, otherwise the holy lands might fall into the hands of impure Israelis, those who are not Jews.

If anyone still had any doubts about the nationalist and racist – yes, racist – character of Zionism, even in its modern dress, then along came the chairman of the JNF, Avraham Duvdevani, and removed the last of these doubts.

Like many other Zionist texts, his interview with Kalman Liebskind on the Kan 11 public broadcasting station this week needs translation into a European language: just replace the word Arabs with Jews – and be shocked. When the text is in Hebrew and relates to Arabs, it seems it does not shock anyone in Israel. “Help, my neighbor is about to sell the land to a Jew,” the despicable European antisemite will say. “Help, my neighbor is about to sell the land to an Arab,” the pure and moral Zionist will say. That’s the way Zionism is, as one of its leaders told us.

The year is 2021, not 1921, the state has arisen and become a superpower, but nothing has changed in the real estate greediness of the desanctified movement. Let’s put aside the grotesque use of the term “redeeming land” – we grew up on it and the Blue Box, and we were already back then completely brainwashed – and let’s not ask from whom the land is being redeemed and for what. But how can an elected representative of the Zionist institutions speak about buying land in the Israeli Galilee, the Arab-Jewish Galilee, in a supposedly democratic country, to save them, lest they fall into the hands of the country’s Arab citizens.

The Galilee, Duvdevani, is not yours – it belongs to its residents, not all of whom were expelled by the forefathers of Zionism in 1948, so it remains the last region with an Arab majority. What’s wrong with that? It’s good. It’s their land, exactly the same way it’s your land, maybe even a little bit more so, because unlike you they have been its native inhabitants for generations.

On Fridays we would wear blue and white and put a coin into the Blue Box. It was meant even then for scrounging donations to buy land from its Arab owners. We believed that was redemption. We were so stupid, and so naïve. Today too most Jewish Israelis think that way. The fact is, it is possible to speak about redeeming land and not be considered to be Itamar Ben Gvir, but rather the mainstream of Zionism.

Duvdevani told how he was called into action: Someone in the Galilee recently informed on his neighbor who was about to sell land to Arabs. Here he entered the picture and redeemed the tormented land. “So tomorrow morning we won’t have to buy the land from Arabs,” said Duvdevani describing, without blinking an eye, the footsteps of the coming redemption. After that, Jewish developers will build a mall or parking lot on the land– and the redeemer will come to Zion.

The rot in the JNF can be smelled from far away. The fact that the Labor Party and Meretz are partners in this stinking nationalist enterprise testifies as much as 1,000 witnesses about the Zionist left.

A “public benefit corporation,” most of whose land is land that was stolen from its owners in the Nakba and was never returned to them; which covered over the ruins of hundreds of villages in forests, just to erase their memory from the face of the earth and block the possibility of their owners returning. A body which, throughout all the years, in practice sold lands only to Jews, and since 2009 even legalized this practice in an official decision; a body for which there is no occupation and no Green Line – just one state between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, in which you buy land only for members of one people; and which has now officially declared its partnership in the war crime called settlement too, after years of doing so via a front company.

On the tables of this company we all have our picnics in the heart of nature, a green company for the benefit of the public, which is nothing but an abominable racial company. It should have been liquidated a long time ago. Until then, it should be boycotted.

Anyone who still has their doubts, yes apartheid or no apartheid, needs to get to know the JNF. With members of the right and left in its top posts and positions for Meretz too – here you have the Jewish national fund for apartheid, the Israeli consensus.