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17 October 2010
By
Jonathan Cook
Israel
secretly staged a training exercise last week to test
its ability to quell any
civil unrest
that might result from a peace deal with the
Palestinian Authority requiring the forcible transfer
of many Arab citizens, the
Israeli media
has reported. The
drill was intended to evaluate the readiness of the
civil defence units, police, army and prison service
to contain large-scale riots by Israel's Arab minority
in response to such a deal. The
transfer scenario echoes a proposal by
Avigdor Lieberman,
Israel's far-right foreign minister, for what he has
termed a "population exchange".
Lieberman proposes land swaps that would force many of
Israel's 1.3 million Arab citizens into a future
Palestinian state in return for annexation to Israel
of most of the Jewish settlements in the
West Bank. The scheme
has been widely criticised as a violation of
international law. He
outlined his proposal to the
United Nations General Assembly last
month. Although
Benjamin Netanyahu,
Israel's prime minister, said he was not
consulted about the speech, he did not admonish
Lieberman. The
training exercise has fuelled fears among Israel's
Arab minority that the government might be hoping to
pressure
Mahmoud Abbas,
the president of the Palestinian Authority, to agree
to land and population swaps as part of US-sponsored
peace negotiations, which have stalled. Dov
Chenin, a member of the Israeli parliament
representing the joint Jewish-Arab Communist Party,
called Tuesday for more details of the exercise from
the government during a speech in the chamber,
although officials offered no immediate response. Chenin
said the drill was a sign Israel was heading in an
"extremely dangerous direction". "A few
years ago, only the extreme right-wing parties talked
about transferring Arab citizens, but now we see that
even the security forces are preparing concrete plans
for carrying out such a scenario."
Netanyahu demanded this week that the Palestinians
recognise Israel as a Jewish state before further
progress was possible -- a move seen by the Arab
minority as a threat to its status inside Israel. A US
State Department spokesman referred to recognition as
"a core demand" and said it had Washington's support.
Haneen
Zoubi, an Arab
member of parliament,
said the exercise was designed to send "very clear
messages" to the Arab minority and Abbas'
negotiators.
"Netanyahu is letting us know that we are not part of
his vision of Israel's future as a Jewish state and
that, if we try to resist his plans, our protests will
be greeted with violent repression," she said. "He
also wants the Palestinian negotiators to understand
his minimum requirements for an agreement. He is not
interested in justice for the Palestinians or in
creating a viable state."
Details of the five-day drill were reported last
weekend on the Voice of Israel radio station by
Carmela Menashe, one of Israel's most respected
military correspondents. The
exercise envisioned extensive disturbances by Israel's
Arab citizens, one-fifth of the population, as
security forces prepared to enforce border changes
that would forcibly relocate many to a new Palestinian
state, according to her report. In the
operation, code-named Warp and Weft, the security
services established a large detention centre in the
Galilee region between Nazareth and Tiberias to cope
with an "unprecedented" number of arrests of Arab
citizens. The
drill anticipated a rapid takeover of the West Bank by
Hamas following the signing of the peace agreement
with the Palestinian Authority. In the exercise, the
security forces had to handle the firing of hundreds
of rockets into Israel, terrorist attacks, prison
riots and breakouts. As
Chenin raised his concerns, Lieberman opened a new
front in his attacks on Israel's Arab citizens,
following his repeated statements questioning their
loyalty to the state. While hosting the Finnish
foreign minister on Tuesday, he accused groups of Arab
citizens of plotting to secede from the state under
orders from the Palestinians in the
occupied territories. "The
Palestinians will try, through various groups among
Israeli Arabs, to overturn the legitimacy of Israel as
a Jewish state and will work to create different
autonomous areas within the state," he
said. Aluf
Benn, a senior columnist for the
Haaretz newspaper,
wrote yesterday that Netanyahu was "hiding behind"
Lieberman and that the prime minister was the "true
instigator" of the wave of anti-Arab policies and laws
the government was promoting. On
Sunday the cabinet approved a bill that would demand a
loyalty oath from non-Jews seeking
citizenship. In the
Yedioth Ahronoth
newspaper, Ahmed Tibi, an Arab MP, accused Netanyahu
of being behind "a gradual ethnic-cleansing scheme --
removing as many Arabs as possible while creating a
Jewish, homogenous Israel".
Opinion polls among Israel's Arab minority have
repeatedly shown strong opposition to any plan to
revoke their citizenship or force them into a
Palestinian state. The
Association of Civil Rights in Israel, the country's
largest human-rights group, wrote to Netanyahu this
week calling the media reports "alarming" and
demanding assurances that there were no plans for "population
transfer". It
added that the impression was being created that "an
issue which is completely illegitimate -- the forced
revocation of the citizenship of some of the country's
Arab citizens -- is perceived by the government as a
reasonable and even likely possibility". Some
observers have speculated that the
public security minister,
Yitzhak
Aharonovitch, who is a member of Lieberman's Yisraeli
Beiteinu Party, may have been the driving force behind
the exercise.
However, Chenin said such an extensive drill involving
so many different branches of the security forces
could not have been carried out without the
involvement of other government ministers, including
Ehud Barak, the
defence minister. Barak,
leader of the
Labor party,
has presented himself in Washington as a moderating
influence on Israel's right-wing government.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are
"Israel and the Clash of Civilisations:
Iraq,
Iran and the
Plan to Remake the
Middle East"
(Pluto
Press) and "Disappearing Palestine:
Israel's Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed Books).
His website is
www.jkcook.net
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