The Nakba continues

11Apr10

Ha’aretz:

“IDF order will enable mass deportation from West Bank

A new military order aimed at preventing infiltration will come into force this week, enabling the deportation of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank, or their indictment on charges carrying prison terms of up to seven years.

When the order comes into effect, tens of thousands of Palestinians will automatically become criminal offenders liable to be severely punished.

Given the security authorities’ actions over the past decade, the first Palestinians likely to be targeted under the new rules will be those whose ID cards bear home addresses in the Gaza Strip – people born in Gaza and their West Bank-born children – or those born in the West Bank or abroad who for various reasons lost their residency status. Also likely to be targeted are foreign-born spouses of Palestinians.

[...]

The new provision also allow the IDF commander in the area to require that the infiltrator pay for the cost of his own detention, custody and expulsion, up to a total of NIS 7,500.

The fear that Palestinians with Gaza addresses will be the first to be targeted by this order is based on measures that Israel has taken in recent years to curtail their right to live, work, study or even visit the West Bank. These measures violated the Oslo Accords.”

According to the Israeli human rights organisation HaMoked, the new military orders will “turn all residents of the West Bank into criminals who may be imprisoned for up to seven years or deported from the area”:

“The orders substantively change the definition of “infiltrator” and in effect apply it to anyone who is present in the West Bank without an Israeli permit. The orders do not define what Israel considers a valid permit. The vast majority of people now living in the West Bank have never been required to hold any sort of permit to be present therein.”

Israeli historian Benny Morris, in his classic text on the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, observed that to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, the Zionist movement had only two options: “the way of South Africa” – i.e. a “the establishment of an apartheid state, with a settler minority lording it over a large, exploited native majority” – or “the way of transfer”, i.e. ethnic cleansing. Since 1967 Israel has tended to go for the former (though by no means exclusively – witness, for instance, the “quiet transfer” in Hebron), constructing an apartheid-like system in the occupied territories and confining Palestinians to ever-smaller bantustans. In the long term, however, the logic of Israeli policies clearly points to expulsion, which is why developments like this are so troubling.

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Tags: ethnic-cleansing, Gaza, Nakba, occupation, transfer, West Bank