The Israeli government is set to demolish 88 homes in the Al-Bustan area of Silwan in East Jerusalem. The demolitions will displace 1,500 Palestinians.
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The eviction notices have sparked outrage amid Palestinians in the West Bank. A one-day strike was staged to protest the Israeli move.
Demolition orders have been issued on the pretext that Palestinian homes were built without permits. The supposed “lack of permits” is merely an attempt to place a legal veil over Israel’s criminal policy of forced removal and ethnic cleansing. Requiring Palestinians to hold permits issued by illegal Israeli occupiers in order live on their own land is absurd.
By contrast, over the course of decades, Israel has authorized the construction of numerous Israeli settlements on Palestinian lands. Even Israeli settlements without permits are often left alone.
According to the Israeli Coalition Against Home Demolitions, 18,147 Palestinian homes were demolished by Israel between 1967 and 2006. This figure also does not include homes that have been destroyed or significantly damaged by Israeli air or artillery strikes. B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, reports that 89 homes were bulldozed in 2008 alone in East Jerusalem, leaving hundreds homeless.
The recent evictions and demolitions are simply a continuation of the 1948 Western-backed Zionist military campaign that brutally forced more than 750,000 Palestinians off their homeland.
The expansion of settlements in and around Jerusalem is very important to the apartheid state of Israel. Roughly 245,000 Palestinians and 200,000 Israelis live in East Jerusalem. The Palestinian population in all of Palestine now accounts for roughly half of the total population, if not more, and is growing faster than the Jewish population. To the Zionists, a majority Palestinian population is seen as a threat to the exclusivist nature of the Jewish state.
Decades of coordinated destruction and displacement
On Nov. 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 181 to partition the colonial British Mandate of Palestine into two states: one Jewish and one Arab. Palestinian Arabs, who at the time comprised two-thirds of the population, were not consulted prior to the decision.
Despite owning less than 6 percent of the land, the Zionists were awarded 56 percent of Palestine by Resolution 181. On the Palestinian side, there was anger and rebellion. As all parties knew ahead of time, partition meant war. Fighting broke out immediately.
The better-armed Zionist military and terrorist organizations began to systematically raze and wipe out whole villages. By May 15, 1948, when Israel’s independence was proclaimed, 300,000 Palestinians were living and dying in abominable conditions of exile in Lebanon, Gaza, Syria and the Jordan Valley. By the end of that year, the number of dispossessed Palestinians had grown to 750,000.
The Israeli military strategy was to not only to conquer land, but also to drive out as much of the Palestinian population as possible. Nearly 80 percent of the Arab population was forcibly “transferred” to make way for the new Israeli state.
In the 1967 war, Israel seized the remainder of historic Palestine: the West Bank and Gaza. This created 300,000 more refugees, many of whom were second-time exiles, having already fled the Israeli attack 19 years earlier. Settlers now occupy numerous homes that were left behind in Jerusalem by Palestinians expelled in 1948 and 1967.
None of the Palestinians driven out nor their descendants, now numbering more than 6 million, have ever been allowed to return or been compensated for their loss. This injustice remains despite U.N. Resolution 194, passed in December 1948, which stated unequivocally that all refugees must be allowed to return to their homes and have their lands and other property restored to them. Resolution 194 has been reaffirmed in numerous U.N. resolutions over the past six decades.
From the beginning, the policy of the Israeli state has been one of continuous expansion. Ben Gurion, the first Israeli prime minister, summed up this policy soon after the creation of Israel: “[N]ow the issue at hand is conquest. … As for setting the borders—it’s an open-ended matter.” This policy has manifested itself in a succession of wars waged against the Arab peoples.
The U.S. and Israeli governments have ignored the U.N. resolution for more than half a century. While forcibly preventing the return of any exiled Palestinians, the new racist Israeli state proclaimed that any person living anywhere in the world who had proof of one Jewish grandparent—regardless of whether they or their family ever stepped foot in historic Palestine—had the “right of return” to Israel, where they would be granted immediate citizenship in the new, exclusivist Jewish state.
The Israeli colonial-settler state would not be possible without an imperialist sponsor—first Britain and now the United States. The Middle East is rich in natural resources, particularly oil—yet its history is also rich with resistance against foreign domination. In exchange for massive military and economic aid coupled with political support, Israel serves as a garrison state for the projection of U.S. military power into this geo-strategically precious region of the world.
Following the Israeli massacre in Gaza in December and January, the new home demolitions are yet another vivid reminder to the people of the world: The U.S. and Israeli states are guilty of a calculated campaign aimed at forcing the Palestinians to either accept apartheid or outright extermination as a people. All progressives must continue to mobilize in support of the Palestinian struggle against home demolitions, racism and occupation.
