Mar 27, 2024
(First published in Al Majdal, Issue 61 – 2024)
In campaigns and conversations in the UK, one fact becomes obvious: not everyone grasps the centrality of para-statal agents of Zionism in general, and of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in particular. In the world outside Palestine, we do, indeed, need to get to know the JNF and its role in establishing Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism, issues which have been fully documented by Palestinian grassroots campaigners and human rights organisations for many years.
Western progressives are belatedly catching up with the Palestinian analysis. In 2022, Amnesty International denounced Israel as practising the crimes against humanity of Apartheid and Persecution against the Palestinian people. Amnesty named the JNF in its meticulous documentation of Israeli offences from the river to the sea. Even before Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem and many Palestinian human rights organizations had accused Israel of Apartheid. The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) stated in December 2019 that the JNF and other para-statal bodies in Israel carry out material discrimination against non-Jewish persons.
The charge sheet against the JNF is long, yet it has branch offices across the globe, of which many have charitable status. Here in the UK, the JNF derives tax benefits from citizens, many of whom do not know what their money funds. A glance at some of the high-profile British patrons of the JNF offers one reason for this seeming impunity: the likes of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown still act as patrons of the charity and illustrate the influence of the JNF – and Israel’s apologists – on senior figures within the establishment.
The primary bodies overseeing UK charities are the Charities Commission, [1] Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR),[2] and the Fundraising Regulator.[3] These bodies could potentially be used to question the charitable status of KKL (Scotland) and JNF UK. However, the UK’s regulatory system tends to protect organizations aligned with the state’s interests.
Several cases against the JNF have been mounted in the UK, through the regulatory channels. The first complaint to the Charities Commission was made by Stop the JNF as long ago as 2013.[4] Another case was submitted in 2018.[5] Both cases argued cogently against the JNF having charitable status, citing its supremacist ideology, its violations of international law and human rights, offering different case studies in each instance to illustrate JNF’s overtly Zionist political purposes, and, consequently, its failure to meet the standards required of charities. Both of these were rejected. The second, went to the first Tier Tribunal level where an appeal was lodged against the original decision.[6] The Tribunals rejected the appeal.
A complaint to the Fundraising Regulator (LINK) gave detailed examples of the ways in which the JNF UK violates the Fundraising Regulator’s Code.[7] These included the JNF’s website posting misleading information which would not enable a fair-minded person to make a balanced judgement and, by contrast, the deliberate omission of key elements of JNF UK projects which could not be deemed charitable e.g links with the occupation forces and settlement projects in the West Bank. The Fundraising Regulator conducted a superficial investigation and produced a report that took scant notice of the empirical evidence on the JNF’s activities.
In a sense, the regulatory narrative is profoundly depressing, but it is by looking at the JNF’s history that we begin to see how we have reached this position. In 1884, Prof Herman Shapira proposed a “body that would redeem the land of Israel from foreigners in order to turn it into a national acquisition that would not be for sale but would rather be for leasehold only”. In 1901 the JNF came into being, its “primary objective” being to acquire land “for the purpose of settling Jews on such lands” and establishing Jewish exclusivity, in perpetuity, on those lands.
In 1940 this drive to “redeem” Palestine from “foreigners”, (aka its indigenous Palestinian population) found more chilling expression in Yosef Weitz, a JNF leader of the time: “There is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries, to transfer all of them… not one village must be left… for this goal funds will be found.” To this day, the JNF worldwide still channels funds to Israel which continues to drive Palestinians out of their homes and off their lands.
The pattern was set for the JNF by its leaders in those early years before the establishment of the state of Israel. Before the Nakba, JNF leaders promoted the doctrine of ethnic cleansing, via the Transfer Committee, influencing Ben Gurion’s Consulate in particular, and Zionist ideology in general. On the military level, the Village Files,[8] drafted by the JNF, offered detailed descriptions of Palestinian villages which aided the Zionist militias as they swept through Palestine from 1947-49, evicting 750,000 people and destroying their villages
Britain played a major role in the development of this trajectory. From the Balfour Declaration, through the Mandate, Britain’s establishment (with a few honourable exceptions) encouraged Zionism. It is worth recalling that approximately 200 Palestinian villages were ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias while Britain was the nominal power in Palestine between 1947 and the end of the Mandate in 1948. Not only that, but Britain also actively supported those militias by means of training and armaments. When Palestinians rebelled, it was British forces who repressed the uprising and set a template for Israel to build on: punitive home demolitions, extrajudicial assassinations, night raids, detention without trial. Britain even sent the notorious Black and Tans to Palestine, fresh from their brutal acts of repression in Ireland, to add to Palestinian suffering.
After the Nakba, the JNF played a role in thwarting the UN Resolution 194 by taking swathes of Palestinian land and developing Forests and Parks. 46 of the 68 JNF Forests and Parks lie across stolen Palestinian land. In some cases, trees of European origin have been planted in them, both to prevent the return of those who historically owned and worked the land and to create a Europeanised landscape, more familiar to Jewish newcomers from eastern Europe.
The Forests and Parks are political constructs,[9] the purpose of which is to defy Palestinian return. These forests and parks also comprise acts of “memoricide”, erasing from collective Israeli memory the truth of Palestinian life and the horrors of the Nakba. In many acts of cynical deception, the JNF has tried to build a reputation as an environmental organisation on these Forests and Parks.
Himnuta, a shadowy proxy of the JNF, operates discreetly to acquire Palestinian properties in East Jerusalem and the West Bank through Israel’s discriminatory legal system. Recently, the JNF has become increasingly bold in its defiance of international law, openly declaring its intention to acquire land in the occupied territory”.[10]
In this audacious move, the JNF has shed its disguise and revealed its actions to the world, yet the global response has fallen short. Particularly concerning is the lack of substantial governmental consequences in Britain, highlighting the country’s complicity in the matter.
Today, public awareness in the West, on Israeli Apartheid, is incrementally growing and the Amnesty International report is likely to further increase that. However, grasping settler colonialism as a political framework takes the debate beyond Apartheid.
Emphasizing the intertwined concepts of apartheid and settler colonialism reveals the underlying logic in the Palestinian situation. Unlike traditional colonial models, settler colonialism, akin to the USA and Australia, seeks the erasure of indigenous populations in favour of settlers. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese contends[11] that achieving Palestinian self-determination necessitates dismantling Israel’s settler-colonial occupation and apartheid practices. This perspective extends beyond the apartheid analysis and highlights the nature of the state. While apartheid carries legal leverage, focusing on settler colonialism provides a deeper understanding of Zionism’s objectives.
The settler colonial framing is the key to understanding the JNF. The JNF’s historic contributions to the ongoing Nakba, are obvious applications of the settler colonists’ eliminatory impulse, from its crudest manifestation in the expulsion of the Palestinian people from their land to the destruction of their villages, and then the obliteration of the historical evidence under forests, nature reserves and parks. But elimination also takes more subtle forms and the JNF embraces these too. One illustration is the seemingly apolitical act of cartography, the map-maker’s work of ascribing names to places, which can become a tool for achieving national goals.
The JNF’s naming of Parks and Forests acts to obliterate one bond (to the Arabic past) and create another (a bond of complicity between Zionism and the wider world). Thus, British Park seeks to flaunt the UK’s complicity with the JNF and ethnic cleansing, secure in the knowledge that the UK establishment stands with Israel, bringing to the surface the historic complicity of this country outlined earlier. The Coretta Scott King Forest attaches an anti-racist nuance to a place which witnessed the notorious Ayn al Zaytoun massacre.
In the words of Seamus Heaney, “Right names were the first foundation / For telling truth”: the JNF’s naming practices, which obliterate the Palestinian truth, build instead a web of deceit.
In conclusion, the JNF’s ideology and contribution to the development and sustenance of the state of Israel rightly draws to it the opprobrium of being an agent both of the settler colonial logic of elimination and of apartheid, in all their manifestations, from brutal and ongoing ethnic cleansing to the erasure of the truth in easily missed acts of re-naming.
Mar 27, 2024
“The prominent Austrian literary organizations Literaturfest Salzburg and Literaturhaus NÖ have cancelled Lana Bastašić’s upcoming residency and reading…” Earlier in the month, the Bosnian-Serb writer had cut her links with her German publisher – S.Fischer – because of their silence in the face of the attacks on Gaza.
Ms. Bastasic responded to the actions of the two distinguished Literary bodies as follows:
“For the sake of truth and transparency, I would like to remind you that the interest was yours, given that you invited me. Your decision to uninvite me is a clear positioning on your part. Let it also be clear that this is a cancellation of a residency and an event we previously agreed on, based solely on my decision to leave a publisher. It is my political and human opinion that children should not be slaughtered and that German cultural institutions should know better when it comes to genocide. You should also know that you have now added yourselves to the long and infamous list of cultural institutions which cancel artists who refuse to stay silent when the world is screaming.
I do not know what literature means to you outside of networking and grants. To me it means, first and foremost, an unwavering love for human beings and the sanctity of human life. Given that you invited me to your residency and festival, you must have been acquainted with my work, which deals closely with the consequences war has on children. Perhaps to you literary works are divorced from real life, but then again you probably have never known war fist hand.
Thank you for uninviting me. I would not want to be part of another institution which not only cancels artists because of their activism, but seems to think silence and censorship is the right answer to genocide. While I am aware of the fact that the funding you receive within the system you inhabit must have made you forgetful of what art really is about, I still want to remind you that (fortunately for precarious writers like myself), you are not Literature. Your money is not Literature. S. Fischer is not Literature. Germany is not Literature. And we, the writers, will remember. Lana Bastašić
Mar 27, 2024
If Israel’s justification for its murderous assault on Gaza is to be believed, its aim is to eliminate Hamas. However, the number of civilians deaths, through bombings and starvation, and the comprehensive destruction of Gaza as a liveable space tells a different story, as do the relentless military and settler attacks throughout the West Bank, where Hamas is not a significant force. Israel’s long-term agenda is to destroy the Palestinians’ connection to the land by removing the land from the people and, should the opportunity arise, the people from the land.
Pre-1948 Zionist settlement activity, relied mainly on the Jewish National Fund (JNF) purchasing land from its Arab owners and evicting Palestinian tenant farmers to make way for Jewish settlers. Where the eviction met with resistance, the JNF called on the British-run police force to enforce the tenants’ removal. Once in JNF ownership, the land could not be resold or leased to Palestinians. Such piecemeal ethnic cleansing over nearly four decades secured, by the end of 1947, only about 7 per cent of Palestine’s total land surface. It required widescale use of terror and destruction of Palestinian villages, in what is now known as the Naqba, to establish the territorial and population base for a Jewish state.
Israel’s conception through ethnic cleansing was widely applauded in the West as arising both causally and as a moral imperative, from the long history of Jewish people seeking sanctuary, first from antisemitic pogroms in the Russian empire, then from persecution in Nazi dominated Europe and, after the war, from a resurgence of antisemitism in parts of eastern Europe. For their part, the liberal democracies restricted entry to Jewish refugees, preferring them to be diverted to Palestine. These factors are undeniable, but they do not account for the process which turned Jews seeking sanctuary into settlers with the aim of replacing, rather than living alongside, Palestine’s indigenous people.
It was the Zionist movement that, under British rule, transformed Jewish immigrants into a colonising force by integrating them into institutions formed to develop a separate Jewish economy and, eventually, on that basis, a state. Accordingly, in addition to the JNF taking over land, the kibbutzim formed exclusively Jewish agricultural collectives and the Histadrut (the Jewish Federation of Labour), excluded Palestinian workers from the enterprises that it owned and, as far as it could, also from those privately owned by Jews.
The 1930 Royal Commission’s report, noted: “The policy of the Jewish Labour Federation is successful in impeding the employment of Arabs in Jewish colonies and in Jewish enterprises of every kind.” In addition, funding from Zionist organisations abroad provided Jewish settlers with subsidized housing, welfare support and much better funded schools than was provided for Palestinian children by the British-run Palestine government.
It was the Zionist movement’s drive to build a Jewish state, not compassion, that led it, in the aftermath of World War 2, to recruit Jews from the Displaced Persons Camps. Zionist leaders had been inclined to be dismissive of the galut Jews considering them, much like antisemites, as sickly and weak. But to prepare their armed forces to establish the Jewish state, they turned to recruit from the camps the young and relatively fit. This is how it came about that from those who had survived the gas chambers, the concentration camps and the ethnic cleansing in Europe, the personnel were enrolled to carry out, only a few years later, the massacre and expulsion of Palestinians.
In December 1948, when the Naqba was still unfolding, the United Nations Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Geocide. Member states, in their deliberation, had in mind the Nazi’s extermination policies. The Convention defined genocide as, “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. It emphasised the deliberate physical destruction of a group but, Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish legal scholar who had fled from Nazism to the US in 1941 and was the Convention’s principal architect, proposed that genocide should also encompass the destruction of the culture and communal life of the targeted group. The victorious imperial states successfully manoeuvred, however, to restrict the scope of what should be deemed genocidal and in subsequent years succeeded in narrowing its interpretation to the physical destruction of ethnic groups. This would exempt from the category of genocide mass civilian deaths that are inflicted in self-defence and not in the deliberate targeting of an ethnic, religious or national group. The US saw in this formulation a way to differentiate its bombing and mass killing of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki from those perpetrated by the Nazis. The self-defence argument has come to be routinely used by Israel to justify its murderous assaults on the civilians of Gaza.
Something of Lemkin’s original intention has remained, nevertheless, even in the narrowed down version in which genocide came to be interpreted in international law. The systematic targeting for destruction of national or ethnic groups had not been captured previously under war crimes because it refers to mass killings that exceed the pursuit of a military objective. Studies of Lemkin’s work over the last couple of decades have pointed out that while his focus was on the atrocities carried out under Nazi rule, his perspective drew on the anti-colonial movement’s critique of imperial conquests and, particularly, of their elimination of indigenous societies through colonisation. He acknowledged in his research notes that this had occurred, for example, in Ireland, through the eviction of Catholic landholders and in the Americas, by European colonisers’ environmental destruction, resource pillaging and the seizing of the indigenous people’s land. Highlighting the connection between genocide and settler colonialism, Lemkin wrote in his work, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: “Genocide has two phases; one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.” He noted that Nazi Germany had colonised land in western Poland and expelled Polish villagers to replace them with ethnic Germans.
In public memorialisation of Nazism, its imperialist dimension and specifically its so-called General Plan for the East, which aimed to ‘Germanize’ Poland and Ukraine are ignored and genocide largely functions as a synonym for the Holocaust. For example, in Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration, alongside the Holocaust, half a dozen other genocides receive token acknowledgment but none that might question the Western liberal democracies’ own record of conquest and colonization. Unsurprisingly, the prospect that Israel is to be judged under the Genocide Convention by the ICJ, on a charge initiated by South Africa, outraged the editor of the Washington Post (26th Jan. 2024): “This is a gross misreading of genocide; indeed, it is a perversion of the term. It would be appalling applied against any state, but it is especially offensive wielded against Israel — a country that was forged in the ashes of the worst genocide in human history…”. The writer of a blog linked to The Times of Israel (17th Jan 2024) vented his anger with the Lemkin Institute for the temerity of accusing Israel of carrying out genocide in Gaza: “Is it even conceivable that an institute named after Raphael Lemkin would accuse Israel of committing genocide?”
Lemkin’s interest in the link between settler colonialism and genocide has been revived mainly by Australia-based scholars responding to the civil rights campaigning of the country’s indigenous people and this, in turn, has impacted on the study of Zionism. But the human rights lobby and the liberal commentariat shows a marked reluctance to consider Israel as a form of settler colonialism. The reports of Amnesty International (2022), Human Rights Watch (2021) and B’Tselem (2021) marshal overwhelming evidence to demonstrate that the Israeli state’s racist practices across historic Palestine constitute a system of apartheid but, in their combined total of nearly 500 pages, the terms settler colonialism or colonisation are not used once.
The word apartheid describes the discriminatory practices of Israel’s political rule but the antagonism that this system seeks to manage arises from an economy in which capital investment and labour are organised to further a Jewish demographic and economic dominance. Israeli settler colonialism rests internally on a coalition of political forces whose commitment to racial exclusivism is mobilised through both material and imaginary gains at the expense of the Palestinians; for external support, it depends on the US and its allies equipping it as a military force that can overcome Palestinian resistance and counter, more widely, any challenges to Western power in the Middle East.
The founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, confided in his diary, in 1895: “We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border, by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment to it in our own [sic] country… Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” With the impunity accorded to Israel by its Western backers, discretion and circumspection have been long discarded: the Palestinians face pogroms and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and mass killing in Gaza. Israel’s genocide, foretold by Herzl and inherent to all settler colonial projects, is there for all to see.
Mar 27, 2024
Haaretz Editorial Feb 12, 2024
Two days after the Hamas attack, the Jerusalem District Planning and Building Committee approved a plan for a new Jewish neighbourhood, Kidmat Tzion, adjacent to the Palestinian neighbourhood of Ras al Amud. The proposal’s security annex includes directives for a perimeter fence, patrol routes, armoured vehicles and security cameras with facial recognition.
It has now become evident that it was just the start. Since the October 7 attack, the government has done everything it can to advance the development of Jewish neighbourhoods in the heart of Palestinian East Jerusalem. To do that, it has taken measures never seen since the city was reunited in 1967.
Nir Hasson has revealed that the government is advancing plans for another neighbourhood, the fourth, this one called Nofei Rachel. The Justice Ministry, headed by Yariv Levin, is the key figure in this undertaking.
Since 1967, there was supposed to have been a clear division of East Jerusalem: The government, mainly the Construction and Housing Ministry, built on the unoccupied hills around Palestinian neighbourhoods. That was how Gilo, Pisgat Ze’ev, Ramot and many others were developed.
At the same time, settler organizations, first and foremost Elad and Ateret Cohanim – with the support of the state but independently – sponsored mostly small settlements in the midst of Palestinian neighbourhoods. This is how a Jewish presence was established in the City of David, the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah.
In recent years, and especially in recent months, that division is no longer being honoured. The government operates through several arms, the main one being the Justice Ministry’s Administrator General, which manages Jewish-owned property from before 1947, and the ministry’s Land Registry and Settlement of Rights. These two bodies have been working hand in hand with private companies operated by settlement activists to establish big neighbourhoods, each with hundreds of residential units in the midst of Palestinian neighbourhoods.
To date, there are four of them: Givat Shaked in Beit Safafa, Kidmat Tzion in Ras al Amud, an as-yet-unnamed neighbourhood in Umm Lisun and Nofei Rachel in Umm Tuba.
These settlements are further proof that the current government of Israel puts narrow and short-term politics over the long-term interests of the general public.
In order to please settler organizations and their inflammatory “Jerusalem is ours alone” rhetoric, the government is sacrificing the quality of life of all Jerusalem residents, the remaining political credit the State of Israel has around the world and the chance of a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Mar 27, 2024
With attention focused on Gaza, Israel steps up home demolitions in the West Bank (Spring 2024)
As Israel continues its genocidal attack on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, its decades-long project of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and East Jerusalem continues largely unreported in the mainstream media.
Demolitions and Displacement
According to UN OCHA (Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) figures, in 2023 almost 4,000 Palestinians were displaced ‘due to policies and practices implemented by Israeli authorities or Israeli settlers’. This is the highest number of displacements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem recorded by OCHA in a single year since it started keeping records in 2009. OCHA uses the term ‘displacement’; we call it ‘ethnic cleansing’.
The largest number (over 1,500 people) were driven from their homes due to settler violence, access restrictions and shrinking access to grazing land. Shockingly, 1,208 Palestinians (81% of the total) were displaced between 7th October 2023 and the end of the year. At least 14 Palestinian communities were completely ethnically cleansed and are now non-existent.
Over 200 structures, mainly in area A, were destroyed during operations by Israeli forces, resulting in over 900 Palestinians being made homeless. Particular targets were Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams. The bulldozing of roads by the Israeli authorities destroyed vital infrastructure, such as water and sewage networks, affecting ‘hundreds of thousands of Palestinians’ according to OCHA.
In acts of collective punishment, Israel demolished 37 homes on ‘punitive grounds’, leaving 173 people, including 73 children, homeless.
The forced demolition of homes and other structures due to lack of building permits has long been a tool of ethnic cleansing. Demolitions are carried out by Israel, at an estimated cost of between $20,000 and $30,000 (£15,700 and £23,500) to the owner, or by the owners themselves. In 2023 such forced demolitions accounted for the destruction of 895 buildings, 214 of which were homes. The remaining buildings were not inhabited but their destruction undermined people’s livelihoods or access to services. These demolitions made over 1,100 Palestinians homeless, almost 600 of whom were from East Jerusalem.
And the demolitions and ethnic cleansing continues this year. Worryingly, up to 5th March, a further 229 buildings were demolished, rendering 545 more Palestinians homeless. This compares with 347 people displaced during the equivalent period last year. If this level of destruction continues, the number of people driven from their homes this year will far outstrip the 2023 figures. There is more detailed information on demolitions and displacement here.
Denied Building Permits
Most of the buildings demolished in the West Bank are due to construction taking place without an Israeli issued building permit. These are practically impossible for Palestinians to obtain due to Israel’s discriminatory laws. As mentioned above, in 2023 a total of 895 buildings were demolished for this reason – 76% of all demolished structures. The guise is law enforcement but the reality is ethnic cleansing. At a meeting of the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee of the Knesset in July last year representatives of the Civil Administration and Minister Bezalel Smotrich reported that 95% of building permit applications submitted by Palestinians in Area C were rejected. However, according to a ‘Peace Now’ article (10th Aug. 2023) the situation is even worse, with only 21 building permits granted between 2016 and 2018. Data provided by Bimkom, an Israeli Human Rights organisation, shows that between 2016 and 2020 Palestinians submitted 2,250 building permit applications and only 24 were agreed – a 99% rejection rate. Bimkom’s full report can be found here.
As permits are almost impossible to obtain, Palestinians are forced to build without a permit. Consequently an estimated 28% of homes in East Jerusalem are ‘illegal’. According to Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer specialising in this area, Israeli authorities have issued orders to demolish most of them There are approximately 20,000 outstanding demolition orders for properties in East Jerusalem and these orders will never expire.
Home demolitions are prohibited under international law unless they are necessary for military operations. But Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine Director of Human Rights Watch, told Al Jazeera that Israel had created a legal structure to allow it to demolish Palestinian homes. According to Shakir the different ways to enforce demolitions all further the same objective of ‘forcing Palestinians off their land and maximising land for Jewish Israelis’.
Illegal Settlements
Meanwhile the approval and construction of illegal Israeli settlements continues apace. Most recently the Israeli government advanced plans for more than 3,400 new homes in settlements in the occupied West Bank. About 70% of the homes will be built in Ma’ale Adumim, east of Jerusalem, with the rest in nearby Kedar and Efrat, south of Bethlehem. This is in addition to a previous decision to authorise approximately 50 illegal agricultural outposts with the aim of taking control of open lands in the West Bank (for information about the JNF’s funding of illegal outposts see ‘Ethnic Cleansing Dressed as Welfare Work’ in the November 2023 StJNF Newsletter). After the announcement, Smotrich, who is in charge of civil affairs in the West Bank, stated that 18,515 housing units had been approved for construction during the past year. He posted on X ‘The enemies try to harm and weaken us, but we will continue to build and be built up in this land.’ It is worth noting that Smotrich was one of the founders of Regavim, an Israeli settler organisation which promotes the expansion of Israeli settlements and campaigns for the demolition of Palestinian homes.
The expansion of the number of housing units in Ma’ale Adumim is of particular concern. At the time of writing there are no further details but the ‘frozen’ plan for the so called “E1 area” (which runs between the eastern edges of illegally annexed East Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim) would effectively split the West Bank in two, cutting off East Jerusalem from Palestinian communities in the West Bank and preventing the creation of a contiguous Palestinian state. Are the plans to construct almost 3,500 new illegal settlement units in the area part of ‘unfreezing’ this plan?
There has been widespread condemnation from a number of countries to this recent announcement. Antony Blinken, the United States Secretary of States, surprised many when he announced that the USA viewed settlements as illegal under international law. The statement brought the USA back in line with the vast majority of countries by reverting to a position overturned by the Trump administration in 2019.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, declared that ‘Reports … that Israel plans to build a further 3,476 settler homes in Maale Adumim, Efrat and Kedar fly in the face of international law’. In his report to the Human Rights Council Turk said that the establishment and continuing expansion of settlements amounts to the transfer by Israel of its own civilian population into the territories that it occupies, which amounts to a war crime under international law (our emphasis). Furthermore, that the policies of the current Israeli Government appear aligned, to an unprecedented extent, with the goals of the Israeli settler movement to integrate the occupied territory into the State of Israel.
But although many world leaders deplore and condemn the destruction of Palestinian homes, the resulting forced evictions, and the expansion of the illegal Israeli settlements, this is little more than hand-wringing. There is little, if any, appetite to take meaningful action such as ending the arms trade, implementing sanctions, or, in the case of the USA, ending it’s long-standing military ‘aid’ of $3.8 billion a year to Israel. It’s left to us, the ordinary people of the world, to take action – boycott Israeli goods and those companies complicit in Israel’s war crimes; call on our politicians to stop arming Israel; demand that Local Government Pension Schemes divest from companies that support Israel’s violations of international law; and campaign to end the role of the JNF in the ongoing displacement of indigenous Palestinians from their land and the destruction of the natural environment. Let’s make our voices heard!
Sources Al Jazeeera, BBC News website, UNOCHA, foreignpolicy.com, Peace Now, UN OCHA, Jerusalem Story, Bimkom.
Nov 7, 2023
NOTE: This article was written before the onslaught on Gaza and the escalating attacks on the West Bank, carried out by armed settlers and Israeli Occupation Forces, with the full support of the Israeli state. In a recent attack, Ahmad and his extended family were given the stark choice by settlers: leave your home within 24 hours or be killed. This article describes the background to this crisis for one family – a crisis replicated across the West Bank.
“Any child wants to live happily, but I did not live any joyful or safe moments. The settlers’ terrorism ruined my life and my family life too, we are badly suffering because of these unbearable conditions, it turns us to hopeless humans’‘, narrates Ahmad, a 32 years old Palestinian from a West Bank village.
Ahmad lives with his wife and their two children in part of a house that he has inherited from his parents. In the other part of the same house, his brother, Salah, also lives with his wife and their 4 children. Ahmad and Salah were born and grew up in the house that their parents established in the 1970s on top of a hill at the edges of their village, which is located in the south of Nablus. It is – or was – the perfect location for the family, with land, sweeping views and everything that makes life worth living.
After founding an illegal settlement in 1983 on occupied lands of six villages, the family home became isolated from the rest of the village. It then became target for the settlers’ violence, determined to expand across all the lands of the village.
The second Intifada was the turning point in the increasing of the number and intensity of the settlers’ aggressive attacks against the family. As Ahmad recounts: “In 2000 we woke up in the middle of night to shouts, threatening us with war and death – with fire and flames devouring our bedrooms, and destroying our furniture. It was an assault by dozens of settlers who sneaked under the shield of night into our house, terrified us and vandalized our properties”.
This raid was just the beginning of a series of settlers’ attacks to terrorize, displace the family, and confiscate their house and land. Ahmad adds, “My father couldn’t withstand this incident; a few months later he suffered a heart attack and passed away as result of his agony. My mother then took the roles of father and mother. She carried the burden of raising her orphaned children and protecting her house from the settlers”.
Zayneb, Salah’s wife, who has lived in the same house for 20 years, talks about the settlers’ violence: “I can’t forget that night when the settlers set fire to our bedroom where I and my husband were sleeping. I was terrified and wanted to run away to the other room on the second floor. I was pregnant and slipped because of fear. The settlers tried to throw us out of the house by threatening us and destroying our belongings. The memories of this incident and the settlers’ faces are still vibrantly alive in my mind”
Recently, the family noticed that the settlers’ attacks have dramatically increased and become even more violent after the fascist right wing party took power in the Israeli government last year. Ahmad tells us: “After the settlers’ pogrom at the adjacent town of Hawara, a few months ago, I felt very vulnerable, and powerless. The settlers attacked our house in hundreds from all directions backed with the Israeli army soldiers”.
The settlers’ violence restricts family life and makes it unbearable. They are literally isolated from their village and community as their house is located behind the main road and the settlers have fixed a gate to prevent anybody from reaching their house, making them even more vulnerable. In addition, the only road that connects them with the village is rough and hard to cross for the locals. Ahmad adds: “Our social life is totally absent, we are unable to travel for our social commitments. Also, people feel unsafe coming to our house. We ourselves don’t feel safe at all, I can’t sleep overnight because I want to protect my children from any potential attack by the settlers”.
Ahmad and his family don’t have a normal life, it has turned into a prison and a misery. The children are unable to go to school without an escort, to move freely, or even to play in the house yard. He says, “My nephew had many violent experiences at the hands of the settlers, who attempted to kidnap him while he was on his way to the school. Luckily, thanks to our neighbour he was rescued. He became traumatized after this incident and refused to go to the school.”
Looking back to his childhood Ahmad feels desperate and hopeless; he bitterly adds: “I’m 32 years old, and I can’t remember when I experienced a happy day. I haven’t even attended my sisters’ wedding ceremonies. I had dreams for my children’s future to live peacefully in this house, but this vicious reality blew all my dreams into the wind.”
Under the dangerous and regular attacks of the settlers, Ahmad was forced to quit his work to guard his family, he says: “To put it simply, it is an unattainable wish to go to my work and not receive a call notifying me that the settlers have attacked my house. Consequently, I quit my job and I’m unemployed for the last two years, suffering much financial hardship.”
On top of that, the settlers try to destroy any source of economic sustainability for the family, Zayneb states: “We had around 20 cattle that provided us with food and income. One day the settlers intentionally poisoned the water that the cattle used to drink from and they died at once – they killed them.”
Despite all the obstacles and torture, the family decided to resist, and defend their house at any price. Ahmad says: “Once, the mayor of the illegal colony said to us, ‘Do you want to wake up to screams, attacks, and fire? You can end this torture by accepting our offer to buy this house for any amount that you want.’”
“We utterly reject this; we are here resisting and staying steadfast in our land – it is our dignity, honour and moral core until death and even after death”
In this way, the family has been disrupting the settler colonial expansion on the Palestinian lands in their village for over 20 years. Ahmad reflects: “The settlers are extremely violent, and we can’t predict their actions; they dedicate all their time and capacity to hurt and expel us.”
Ahmad also says: “We usually resist and push the settlers back by using stones, which are the only weapon that we have, while the settlers attack us with many tools and all other means”. Therefore, Ahmad believes that they need more support to mitigate the effects of the settlers’ violence and reinforce their house.
Currently, Ahmad is slowly building a cement wall around his house by hand, and he needs to fix the fence above the wall but he doesn’t have the financial capacity to complete this. Ahmad says: “It is very urgent to pave the road that connects us with the village to make our life easier and strengthen the solidarity of the village with us”.
Ahmad emphasized that he is staying in his house and land. He says: “We want to have a normal life, to be free and safe in our house and land, the only place that we have and the only place we want to live in.”
