Advocating for an end to the Israeli Occupation of Palestinians was the main reason I joined Daily Kos in 2006. My first years of online writing before joining this site, were devoted almost exclusively to this topic, and this continued for quite a few years over here too.
But in recent years I have gradually deserted it. Not just in writing here; I have also neglected activities like editing the website of the tiny but remarkable organization The Villages Group (a website which I had originally set up), and other aspects of activism.
It seems that I have lost hope. The almost-unnatural resilience of the system of evil manifesting itself most blatantly in the Occupation, but surfacing in other aspects of Israel-Palestine life, has literally worn me down. I guess I have always been somewhat of a slacktivist, compared with others. I just bumped into Amin Odeh the other day. He continues to vigil in downtown Seattle every week, rain or shine. We are of similar age, and grew up a few km from each other; he under the Occupation and later organizing against it in the First Intifada, me over it and at times directly serving it as a soldier.
But this is not about me. Better people, better activists than I get worn out by the Occupation and by I-P. It used to be a very active topic here. Now amazing voices like David Harris-Gershon haven’t written for months, despite momentous events on the ground. The indefatigable subir keeps the flame going, but even he writes about I-P only about once a month nowadays. Palestinian or other Arab bloggers who were here, some of them much loved by the greater site community, were driven out by relentless dog whistles and shithousery from a minority who wanted to silence them.
But this is not about us. It’s about Palestinian life, which is being robbed en masse, year after year, decade after decade, while we play the role of mute bystanders and accomplices. Palestinians cannot quit the battle for their freedom and dignity - because they are forced to be born into it.
Their actions may be misguided at times, but so have been the actions of every single indigenous people facing this universal type of onslaught by vastly stronger forces.
Palestinians and their few but loyal allies continue on. We should do our part to end the travesty of their ongoing subjugation. More about one recent high-profile battle fought in the courts and in the Israeli public arena, below the fold.
In July, Israel’s parliament approved the Basic Law: Israel (colloquially known as “The Nation Law”) by mostly party-line vote (62 to 55). Like almost everything in I-P politics, figuring out what the law is seems cloaked in many opaque layers of prior knowledge. If it makes you feel better, most Israelis don’t possess or care to acquire that knowledge either. I won’t do an entire tutorial, but here’s a skinny.
Divide and Subjugate
The law directly targets one major group of Palestinians, but affects all of them to some extent. Like many ruling nations before them, Israel’s leading strategy towards Palestinians has been divide and conquer. There are 5 major groups of Palestinians in terms of their status and location, each facing their own challenges. Very seldom even an entire one of them unites together effectively, let alone more than one.
- Occupied Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. This is the most visible group in world news and politics, because that’s where bloodshed most commonly occurs. Israel has to a large degree succeeded to divide and subdivide this group even further, most openly into West Bank vs. Gaza, which Israelis pretend (completely falsely) is “not occupied anymore”.
- Palestinians in some Arab countries, mostly Syria and Lebanon, where they often still live in refugee camps, and lack any formal status. They vie with Occupied Palestinians in being the worst off, as was tragically demonstrated in the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, and the more recent siege and starvation of the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus.
- Other Diaspora Palestinians, mostly in Jordan and in the West, where they usually enjoy equality and prosperity, but have been relatively powerless to alleviate the plight of other Palestinians. Very often, they cannot even travel to the town of their ancestors in Israel. In the West, they often face a political system that’s almost universally hostile to Palestinian rights. In the US, Palestinian-American politicians have often sadly found a more welcoming home in the Republican party than among Democrats. Hopefully the primary victories of Congresswoman-elect Rashida Tlaib, and of nominee Ammar Campa-Najjar (who actually lived in Gaza for 4 years, and now has a fighting chance to unseat lowlife thief Duncan Hunter), will begin to change that. Ms. Tlaib in particular doesn’t seem like one who puts up and shuts up about injustice.
- Palestinian-Israelis: Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship, which for decades have been known in the West via the Israeli propaganda names of “Israeli Arabs” or “Israel’s Arabs” (thus stripping them of a specific national identity). Palestinians usually call them “[19]48 Arabs”. This is the group most directly targeted by the Basic Law: Israel.
- Palestinians holding an East Jerusalem ID. This is the smallest and most confused-about group. They have Israeli residency, but not citizenship. They can travel freely and work in Israel, can vote for Jerusalem municipal elections (which most of them boycott), but not in national elections. And they may lose their residency if absent from the country for some amount of time — even if prior to that their family had lived in Jerusalem continuously for centuries. Israeli Jews usually lump them with Group 4 (and arguably the law targets them to the second-largest extent), whereas Occupied Palestinians and international bodies usually lump them with Group 1. But they are a distinct group with its own challenges.
How does the Law Target Palestinian-Israelis?
In its very first clause, the new law declares that “The State of Israel is the national state of the Jewish people” (a favorite rhetorical trick invented by Bibi specifically to derail any peace negotiations). But it doesn’t stop there: the clause further states that
Exercising the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.
(translations by Adalah)
This automatically forbids any recognition of Palestinian-Israelis as a national minority, because there is no room left for a national minority in the Basic Law: Israel version of Israel.
This, despite Palestinian-Israelis being the indigenous minority, with an obvious national identity that can never be merged with the dominant national identity, as long as the latter is defined as exclusively Jewish (which was just done in the same clause). In terms of universal indigenous rights, it doesn’t really matter how many Palestinian-Israelis there are, but for the record they number over 15% of Israelis citizens (>20% of residents if one includes East Jerusalem).
And the law doesn’t stop at declarations and identities. On a very practical level, clause 3:
A. The state’s language is Hebrew.
B. The Arabic language has a special status; regulation of the use of the Arabic language in or with government institutions will be according to the law.
C. Nothing in this provision is intended to harm the practical status of the Arabic language prior to the enactment of this Basic Law.
...except for, e.g., the fact that prior to this law, human rights organizations could argue (and the courts generally accepted) that Arabic has a co-equal official status as state language, inheriting from pre-1948 British Mandate policies.
Or the fact that despite the verbal pirouettes, this clause does not guarantee denying Arabic in any arena where it didn’t achieve “practical status” prior to the law. And there are countless such arenas, not to mention new ones that inevitably open.
Even worse, clause 7:
The State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and will act to encourage it and to promote and to consolidate its establishment.
The term “settlement” here does not refer necessarily to the ones in the West Bank (about which the law is vague, since unlike the self-determination clause here the term “in the State of Israel” is mysteriously missing) — but to any village, town and city over which Israel’s government may wield some power to “encourage”. Jews are preferred, the others — ...
Ironically, in their zeal to out-flag-wave each other and pass this law, rightwing and centrist politicians conveniently forgot Druze-Palestinian-Israelis, a “model minority” who have thus far been another success story of Israel’s Divide and Conquer. This sub-minority comprising some 2% of the population has many of its sons serving in the Israeli armed forces, and most of its voters supporting Zionist parties, even right-wing ones, rather than parties representing Palestinian-Israelis. Jewish-Israeli politicians love to wax poetic about the “historical blood pact” with the Druze, but have shafted them with this law, in particular with clause 7. Within days, an angry mass demonstration of tens of thousands of Druze took place in downtown Tel Aviv. The embarrassed government-allied politicians started to look for ways to backtrack by carving out some specific exception for the Druze, but the law so blatantly privileges Jews, that such exceptions seem hard to work into it.
Of course, Palestinian-Israelis themselves have NOT taken this lying down. Over the decades this group (initially traumatized and controlled via martial law until 1966) has found its voice, and is often the most potent opposition to Israeli-Jewish supremacy. Which also explains why it was targeted. Now, leading Palestinian-Israeli human rights groups such as Adalah, representing the entire Palestinian-Israeli leadership, together with Jewish-Israeli allies, filed suit against the law.
Old hands and cynicists may say that Israel has been practicing everything that’s in the law on the ground anyway. This is true to a large extent: in particular, land use and allocation has been tilted 100% to privilege Jewish settlements over Palestinian-Israeli ones (I’m talking about inside Israel, although this is true in the Occupied Territories as well).
However, it’s still different when things are enshrined in a Basic Law (which is Israel’s half-assed piecemeal pretend-attempt at a constitution; don’t get me started on that). For example, it diminishes the ability to fight racist policies in court, even if that fight has only had partial success in the past.
Also… what’s one thing that’s NOT mentioned in the law?
Democracy.
A law that defines the intimate essence of Israel as a state, neglects to define it as a democracy. Not a coincidence. Some of the drafts had this term in them, but the majority of the promoters shot it down. What a huge embarrassment.
Arguably this law, similarly to right-wing excesses in present-day America, may turn out to be a hubris-fueled overreach that backfires spectacularly. Above all, it undermines plausible deniability, or as Israelis know it, “Opacity”. So much of what Israel has accomplished since 1948 has been via holding the stick from both ends: we say we’re a democracy, but discriminate massively against our non-Jewish citizens. We use “temporary” martial law to rule over Occupied Palestinians and deny basic rights, and use civil law to give settlers in the same area a life of comfy permanence. And so forth.
Liberal and progressive Zionists in Israel and in the West, in particular, have been mortified by this law, which takes direct aim at their (imagined) political comfort zone with respect to Israel.
But Israel’s government can easily escape accountability for the millionth time, if we don’t hold it accountable. The fight against Trumpism is energizing, but it is also drawing all energy and attention towards it. Americans have great responsibility to what happens in Israel-Palestine, in particular left-of-center Americans, because we cannot expect much good to come from the right wing on this.
I stop here. I needed to write this, warts and all. But this is not about me. Please read more about the Basic Law: Israel, on Adalah’s website, and consider donating to Adalah.
(disclaimer: the Daily Kos group Adalah (Adalah means Justice) is not related to the Adalah NGO, and would not benefit monetarily from any donation)