The first is an analysis of what is happening among Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship, and believes that the next chapter in the Israel-Palestine conflict will focus on the internal Palestinian population vs Israel.
In item 2 Gisha asks (and answers) ‘Who controls the Palestinian Population Registry” You of course can guess who: Israel. This is a throw-back to the Oslo Accords. Arafat for some reason that is unintelligible to me left Palestinian residency rights in the hands of Israel. It was a crucial error, and Palestinians have been paying for it ever since.
Items 3 and 4 are about immigration, 3 about the Falashmura, 4 about returnees from abroad receiving rights similar to those given to immigrants. Something tells me that Israel is worried sick about not having enough Jews! The Falashmura are not Jewish, but it is presumed that they will become so when they arrive here. Wonder where Israel will look next for more Jews to up its demographic lot.
All the best,
Dorothy
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[I’m grateful to Yael for having forwarded this. I’d intended to distribute it yesterday, but felt that 5 items were probably enough, especially since Gideon Levy’s was fairly long. Then I forgot about this item while reading today’s news on line.
It is an important analysis, and I fear accurate. Moreover, it seems to me that Israel’s leaders are doing all they can to rile Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. Should the Palestinians become violent or ‘proven unloyal’ it will make it easier for Israel to kick them out.
Dorothy]
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[forwarded by Yael Korin]
An expectedly perceptive analysis from the Guardian’s Seumas Milne.
The indigenous Palestinians who are citizens of Israel are increasingly rebelling against Israel’s special flavor of apartheid, asserting their Palestinian identity and closely examining the South African model of resistance for inspiration.
The Palestinians of Israel are poised to take centre stage
With the peace process going nowhere, common experience on both sides of the Green Line is creating a new reality
Seumas Milne
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 10 November 2010 21.00 GMT
In a quiet street in the Sheikh Jarrah district of occupied East Jerusalem 88-year-old Rifka al-Kurd is explaining how she came to live in the house she and her husband built as Palestinian refugees in the 1950s. As she speaks, three young ultra-orthodox Jewish settlers swagger in to stake their claim to the front part of the building, shouting abuse in Hebrew and broken Arabic: “Arab animals”, “shut up, whore”.
There is a brief physical confrontation with Rifka’s daughter as the settlers barricade themselves in to the rooms they have occupied since last winter. That was when they finally won a court order to take over the Kurd family’s extension on the grounds that it was built without permission – which Palestinians in Jerusalem are almost never granted. It is an ugly scene, the settlers’ chilling arrogance underpinned by the certain knowledge that they can call in the police and army at will.
But such takeovers of Palestinian homes in Sheikh Jarrah have become commonplace, and the focus of continual protest. The same is true in nearby Silwan, home to upwards of 30,000 Palestinians next to the Old City, where 88 homes to 1,500 Palestinians have been lined up for demolition to make way for a King David theme park and hundreds of settlers are protected round the clock by trigger-happy security guards.
Throughout the Arab areas of Jerusalem, as in the West Bank, the government is pressing ahead with land expropriations, demolitions and settlement building, making the prospects of a Palestinian state ever more improbable. More than a third of the land in East Jerusalem has been expropriated since it was occupied in 1967 to make way for Israeli colonists, in flagrant violation of international law.
Israel’s latest settlement plans were not “helpful”, Barack Obama ventured on Tuesday. But while US-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian negotiations go nowhere and attention has been focused on the brutal siege of Gaza, the colonisation goes on. It is also proceeding apace in Israel proper, where the demolition of Palestinian Bedouin villages around the Negev desert has accelerated under Binyamin Netanyahu.
About 87,000 Bedouin live in 45 “unrecognised” villages, without rights or basic public services, because the Israeli authorities refuse to recognise their claim to the land. All have demolition orders hanging over them, while hundreds of Jewish settlements have been established throughout the area.
The Israeli writer Amos Oz calls the Negev a “ticking time bomb”. The village of Araqeeb has been destroyed six times in recent months and each time it has been reconstructed by its inhabitants. The government wants to clear the land and move the Bedouin into designated townships. But even there, demolitions are carried out on a routine basis.
At the weekend, a mosque in the Bedouin town of Rahat was torn down by the army in the night. By Sunday afternoon, local people were already at work on rebuilding it, as patriotic songs blared out from the PA system and activists addressed an angry crowd.
The awakening of the Negev Bedouin, many of whom used to send their sons to fight in the Israeli army, reflects a wider politicisation of the Arab citizens of Israel. Cut off from the majority of Palestinians after 1948, they tried to find an accommodation with the state whose discrimination against them was, in the words of former prime minister Ehud Olmert, “deep-seated and intolerable” from the first.
That effort has as good as been abandoned. The Arab parties in the Israeli Knesset now reject any idea of Israel as an ethnically defined state, demanding instead a “state of all its people”. The influential Islamic Movement refuses to take part in the Israeli political system at all. The Palestinians of ’48, who now make up getting on for 20% of the population, are increasingly organising themselves on an independent basis – and in common cause with their fellow Palestinians across the Green Line.
Palestinian experience inside Israel, from land confiscations to settlement building and privileged ethnic segregation, is not after all so different from what has taken place in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. After 1948, the Palestinians of Jaffa who survived ethnic cleansing were forced to share their houses with Jewish settlers – just as Rifka al-Kurd is in Jerusalem today. The sense of being one people is deepening.
That has been intensified by ever more aggressive attempts under the Netanyahu government to bring Israel’s Arab citizens to heel, along with growing demands to transfer hundreds of thousands of them to a future West Bank administration. A string of new laws targeting the Palestinian minority are in the pipeline, including the bill agreed by the Israeli cabinet last month requiring all new non-Jewish citizens to swear an oath of allegiance to Israel as a Jewish state.
Pressure on Palestinian leaders and communities is becoming harsher. A fortnight ago more than a thousand soldiers and police were on hand to protect a violent march by a far-right racist Israeli group through the Palestinian town of Umm al-Fahm. The leader of the Islamic Movement, Ra’ed Salah, is in prison for spitting at a policeman; the Palestinian MP Haneen Zoabi has been stripped of her parliamentary privileges for joining the Gaza flotilla; and leading civil rights campaigner Ameer Makhoul faces up to 10 years in jail after being convicted of the improbable charge of spying for Hezbollah.
Meanwhile Israel is also demanding that the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah recognise Israel as a Jewish state as part of any agreement. Few outside the Palestinian Authority – or even inside it – seem to believe that the “peace process” will lead to any kind of settlement. Even Fatah leaders such as Nabil Sha’ath now argue that the Palestinians need to consider a return to armed resistance, or a shift to the South African model of mass popular resistance, also favoured by prominent Palestinians in Israel.
As for the people who actually won the last elections, Mahmoud Ramahi, the Hamas secretary general of the Palestinian parliament, reminded me on Monday that the US continues to veto any reconciliation with Fatah. He was arrested by the Israelis barely 24 hours later, just as talks between the two parties were getting going in Damascus.
The focus of the Palestinian-Israeli struggle has shifted over the last 40 years from Jordan to Lebanon to the occupied territories. With the two-state solution close to collapse, it may be that the Palestinians of Israel are at last about to move centre stage. If so, the conflict that more than any other has taken on a global dimension will have finally come full circle.
When the Palestinian Supreme Court in Ramallah issued a new ruling on 22.10.2010, commentators were quick to declare a breakthrough for the 35,000 Palestinian residents who live in the West Bank but whose registered addresses are in Gaza and who therefore live under the threat of deportation. The ruling ordered the Palestinian Interior Ministry to carry out all the necessary procedures to change these residents’ addresses from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank.
According to the Maan news agency, the ruling “will allow thousands of Palestinians to move freely within the West Bank”. It seems, that Maan (along with one of the members of the Turkel Commission to Examine the Maritime Incident), believed that the Palestinian Authority, rather than Israel, controls the Palestinian population registry and is therefore authorized to change addresses and inform Israel thereof.
The Palestinian Interior Ministry, which issues identity cards after receiving Israeli permission, has long stopped giving the Israeli army notice of address changes from Gaza to the West Bank. This is due to the fact that since 2000, Israel has refused to register changes in address of Palestinians who moved from Gaza to the West Bank. Equipped with new military orders, Israeli soldiers even arrest and deport such residents, meaning many of them restrict their movement within the West Bank out of fear they will be arrested at a checkpoint and deported to Gaza.
But the Palestinian Supreme Court ruling stated that under the Oslo Accords, the authority to change addresses was transferred to the PA which is required to update its records and then inform Israel of the change.
And that is indeed what the Palestinian Interior Ministry did in the last few weeks. At the request of around 1500 enthusiastic applicants, the Ministry changed their addresses in its registry from Jabaliya to Nablus and from Rafah to Ramallah. As per the court ruling, the Interior Ministry then sent approximately 1500 change of address notices to the Israeli District Coordination Office in Beit El.
However, when the Israeli coordination officials informed the Palestinian Interior Ministry that they refused to change the addresses in the Israeli computer file, the Palestinian Interior Ministry returned its records to their previous status: from Nablus back to Jabaliya and from Ramallah back to Rafah. It appears that the PA can print any identity card it wants, but only the Israeli army can decide whether a resident is allowed to move within the West Bank and avoid deportation. The soldier at a checkpoint takes his orders from his commander and not the Palestinian court. When he decides whether to deport someone or not he relies on the Israeli registry and not the Palestinian.
The Palestinian Interior Ministry therefore decided it is better for residents to carry papers approved by the one who controls the borders – the State of Israel. And so control of the borders continues to mean control of the Palestinian population registry common to Gaza and the West Bank.
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3. Haaretz,
November 14, 2010
Israel unanimously approves immigration of 8,000 Falashmura from Ethiopia
Unlike Ethiopian Jews, Falashmura are not allowed into Israel under the Law of Return and will convert during absorption process.
The cabinet on Sunday unanimously approved a plan to bring 7,846 members of the Ethiopian Falashmura community to Israel over the next four years, after years of lobbying.
Over the past decade, the cabinet has voted several times to bring to Israel the remaining members of the Falashmura in Ethiopia. But each time, it discovered that the transit camps in northern Ethiopia, where they were based, were being filled with Ethiopians who claimed to belong to the “Seed of Israel” and had relatives in Israel.
Activists who support the rights of the Falashmura to immigrate to Israel had promised to end all lobbying activities on their behalf if the proposal was approved.
The rights of the Falashmura to immigrate to Israel has sparked controversy, with opponents arguing that members of this community are Christians whose link to Judaism either does not exist or is weak, and for this reason, it is impossible to estimate how many will eventually seek to immigrate to Israel.
Unlike Ethiopian Jews, the Falashmura are not being allowed into Israel under the Law of Return. Consequently, as part of their absorption process, they undergo conversion and become naturalized citizens.
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4. Haaretz,
November 12, 2010
Returning citizens to get similar rights as immigrants
Absorption Ministry announces ‘revolution’ in effort to persuade expat Israelis to come home.
Returning citizens will receive benefits “similar to those of new immigrants,” the Absorption Ministry announced this week. Speaking about a “revolution” in the state’s policy toward returnees, Minister Sofa Landver presented a new plan Wednesday at a session of the Knesset Committee for Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs to attract returnees by offering perks in taxation, customs, health, education, employment and entrepreneurship.
To reach its declared goals of bringing 15,000 overseas Israelis back home every year, the ministry listed several areas in which citizens are now eligible for unprecedented benefits if they choose to return.
For example, returning citizens will for the first time be eligible for individual income tax credits, “just as a new immigrant arriving in Israel,” the ministry declared in a statement.
“For the first time, the status of a returning citizens will be equivalent to that of a new immigrant, for those residents returning to Israel after a stay abroad of at least six years (including car rights, but in accordance with the terms stipulated in the Transportation Law ),” the statement said.
Additionally, those who return to Israel after only two years abroad will receive customs exemptions on household items, a benefit previously only available to citizens who were overseas for at least six years.
In the framework of the new campaign, the Education Ministry will also add 1,600 hours of weekly supplementary instruction to assist children recognized as returning citizens by the education system. For the first time, senior citizens who complete a waiting period will be recognized as eligible for health insurance.
“Returning citizens are an asset and an important contribution to the strength of the state,” Landver said. “The Israeli economy needs returning citizens to flourish.”
Esther Blum, project coordinator at the Council of Immigrant Associations, lauded the initiative.
“The program indeed might help many Israelis come back to Israel, as returning citizens are given almost the same rights and benefits that new immigrants receive,” she said.
Other colleagues in the field cast doubt that Israelis would return for these benefits unless they were already sitting on the fence.
The bulk of returning citizens were previously residing in the United States, according to ministry figures. Between November 1, 2007 and September 1, 2009, some 9,850 Israelis returned from the U.S. The U.K. followed with 1,190. About 900 Israelis moved back from Canada, compared to 380 from Australia and 310 from South Africa.
Against a backdrop of special incentives offered for Israel’s 60th anniversary and the global economic crisis, the numbers of returnees jumped from 4,680 Israelis in 2006 to 11,160 in 2009.
