Let us dismantle
the myth that “Israel needs a partner for peace.” A recent
commentary by Pres. Barack Obama is enough to point out the
contradictions of this mantra. On Sept. 12, Obama assured, “We seek
a future in which Palestinians live in a sovereign state of their
own.” Minutes later, he stated: “If [Palestinian statehood] came
to the [United Nations] Security Council, we would object very
strongly, precisely because we think it would be counterproductive.
We don’t think it would actually lead to the outcome that we want,
which is a two-state solution.”
The massive lie
that Israel is an innocent victim that has no “partner for peace”
is highlighted with its most recent land grab. Israel has a long
history of land grabs going back to the 1948 al-Nakba (the
Catastrophe) when over 700,000 Palestinians were forcibly removed
from their land while their villages were destroyed. The Israeli
Knesset will vote to approve the “relocation” of 30,000 Bedouin
people in the Naqab of the West Bank to other Arab villages. Some 20
Bedouin villages are now under the threat of demolition.
The Bedouin
people
Historically, the
Bedouin all over the Middle East are a nomadic people who survive by
working the land and raising camels, sheep and goats. The way of life
of the Bedouin people has been under threat since the 1950s; they
have been trying to achieve land recognition in the Beersheva
reservations to which they were originally “relocated.”
An article from the
Electronic Intifada uses a recent example to shed light on a
60-year-old struggle in the Israeli court system:
“The most recent
case was that of the Bedouin village of al-Araqib. After years of
legal discussions in the Beersheva district court, the land claims of
the village were not recognized despite the fact that the residents
of the village hold land deeds dating back to the times of Ottoman
rule in Palestine. The response came in July 2010, when the Israeli
authorities, accompanied by the Israel Lands Authority (ILA) and more
than 1,300 police, demolished the village.
“Since the
initial razing of the village … the people of al-Araqib rebuilt
their village with their own hands. In response, the state razed the
village yet again, and as of the last destruction, the village has
now been rebuilt on 29 separate occasions.”
The number of
Bedouin in the West Bank is over 200,000, and an immediate threat for
half of them comes in the form of living in one of 46 “unrecognized”
villages where they have absolutely no protection from home
demolitions. The legislation immediately threatening 30,000 Bedouin
is not only another expulsion from their land but the destruction of
their way of life.
Should the Knesset
vote pass, this will be the largest organized “relocation” of a
group of Palestinians in decades, with the first group of 2,400 to be
removed from East Jerusalem. The majority of these people will be
two-time refugees, their families having been displaced from the
Negev in 1948.
The nature of
the Israeli state and the need to fight back
In light of the
very real threat to the Bedouin, the larger context of their struggle
is that they are part of a colonized people whose colonizers are
perpetuating an apartheid system under the guise of defense and
religious conflict. The myth of a struggle between religions must be
shattered. The Israeli government has systematically imprisoned the
Palestinian populations into several small land clusters—very much
like heavily militarized reservations with very limited Palestinian
access to movement between them. Those reservations are constantly
shrinking as Israel illegally expands its settlements on stolen land.
With the recent bid
for Palestinian recognition in the U.N. in the context of upheaval
across the Arab world, the Israeli government has sped up its
reactionary policies to build the West Bank, Jewish-only settlements
as much as possible, and hope that the eyes of the world do not fall
on their racist and murderous ways.
As progressives in
the United States, we must oppose the U.S. government’s political,
financial and military support to the Israeli apartheid system. We
must also stand in solidarity with our Palestinian brothers and
sisters in their fight for self-determination.
