Judaisation Vs Justice: Israel's War On The Bedouin Proves 1948 Settled Nothing
28 December 2013
By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth
As United States envoys shuttle back and forth in
search of a peace formula to end the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a matter supposedly
settled decades ago is smouldering back into life.
In what was billed as a "day of rage" last month,
thousands of Palestinians took to the streets to
protest against a plan to uproot tens of thousands of
Bedouin from their ancestral lands inside Israel, in
the Negev (Naqab).
The clashes were the worst between Israeli police and
the country's large Palestinian minority since the
outbreak of the second intifada 13 years ago, with
police using batons, stun grenades, water cannon and
arrests to deter future protests.
Things are only likely to get more heated. The
so-called Prawer Plan, being hurried through
parliament, will authorise the destruction of more
than 30 Bedouin villages, forcibly relocating the
inhabitants to deprived, overcrowded townships. Built
decades ago, these urban reservations languish at the
bottom of every social and economic index.
Bedouin leaders, who were ignored in the plan's
drafting, say they will oppose it to the bitter end.
The villages, though treated as illegal by the state,
are the last places where the Bedouin cling to their
land and a traditional pastoral life.
But the Israeli government is equally insistent that
the Bedouin must be "concentrated" – a revealing term
employed by Benny Begin, a former minister who helped
to formulate the plan. In the place of the villages, a
handful of Jewish towns will be erected.
The stakes are high, not least because Israel views
this battle as a continuation of the 1948 war that
established a Jewish state on the ruins of Palestine.
Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, argued last
week that the fight over the Negev proves "nothing has
changed since the days of the tower and stockade" – a
reference to heavily fortified outposts the Zionists
aggressively built in the 1930s to evict Palestinians
from the land they had farmed for centuries.
These outposts later became land-hungry farming
communities, such as the kibbutz, that gave the Jewish
state its territorial backbone.
Mr Lieberman's view reflects that of the government:
"We are fighting for the lands of the Jewish people,
against those who intentionally try to rob and seize
them."
The labelling of the Bedouin as "squatters" and
"trespassers" reveals much about the intractability of
the wider conflict – and why the Americans have no
hope of ending it as long as they seek solutions that
address only the injustices caused by the occupation
that began in 1967.
Doron Almog, who is in charge of implementing the
Prawer Plan, observed last week that the Bedouin were
not resisting it to save their communities but "to
create territorial contiguity between Hebron and the
Gaza Strip". In other words, in Almog's paranoid
thinking, the Bedouin's struggle for rights is really
a cover for their ambition to serve as a bridgehead
between the West Bank and Gaza.
In truth, both Israel and the Palestinians understand
that the war of 1948 never really finished.
Suhad Bishara, a lawyer specialising in Israeli land
issues for the Adalah legal centre, has called the
Prawer Plan a "second nakba", in reference to the
catastrophic events of 1948 that stripped the
Palestinians of their homeland.
Israel, meanwhile, continues to conceive of its 1.5
million Palestinian citizens – however peaceable – as
just as alien and threatening to its interests as the
Palestinians in the occupied territories.
The roots of the Prawer Plan can be traced to one of
Zionism's earliest principles: "Judaisation". There
are cities across Israel, including Upper Nazareth,
Karmiel and Migdal Haemek, founded as Judaisation
communities next to large Palestinian populations with
the official goal of "making the land Jewish".
Judaisation's faulty premise, in the pre-state years,
was the fantasy that Palestine was "a land without a
people for a people without a land". Its sinister flip
side was the cheery injunction to Zionism's pioneers
to "make the desert bloom", chiefly by driving out
Palestinians.
Nowadays, the term "Judaisation", with its unpleasant
overtones, has been discarded in favour of
"development". There is even a minister for
"developing the Negev and the Galilee" – Israel's two
areas with large concentrations of Palestinians. But
officials are interested only in Jewish development.
Last week, in the wake of the clashes, the Israeli
Haaretz daily published leaked documents showing that
the World Zionist Organisation – an unofficial arm of
the government – has been quietly reviving the
Judaisation programme in the Galilee.
In an effort to bring another 100,000 Jews to the
region, several new towns are to be built, for Jews
only, dispersed as widely as possible in contravention
of Israel's own national master plan, which requires
denser building inside existing communities to protect
scarce land resources.
All this generosity towards Israel's Jewish population
is at the expense of the country's Palestinian
citizens. They have not been allowed a single new
community since Israel's founding more than six
decades ago. And the new Jewish towns, as Arab mayors
complained last week, are being built intentionally to
box them in.
For officials, the renewed Judaisation drive is about
asserting "Israeli sovereignty" and "strengthening our
hold" over the Galilee, as if the current inhabitants
– Israeli citizens who are Palestinian – were a group
of hostile foreigners. Haaretz more honestly
characterised the policy as "racism".
Judaisation casts the conflict between Israelis and
Palestinians in zero-sum terms, and thereby makes it
unresolvable. In considering its Palestinian citizens,
Israel speaks not of integration, or even
assimilation, but of their enduring status as a "fifth
column" and the Jewish state's "Achilles heel".
That is because, were principles of justice and
equality ever to be enforced, Palestinians in Israel
could serve as a gateway by which millions of exiled
Palestinians might find their way back home.
With the policy of Judaisation revoked, the
Palestinian minority could end the conflict without
violence simply by pulling down the scaffolding of
racist laws that have blocked any return for the
Palestinians since their expulsion 65 years ago.
This is why Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu
demands as part of the current peace negotiations that
the Palestinians sanctify the Judaisation principle by
recognising Israel as a Jewish state. It is also why
the talks are doomed to failure.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize
for Journalism. 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 new website is
www.jonathan-cook.net. A version of this article first
appeared in The National, Abu Dhabi.
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