Israel’s Palestinian Minority
Thrown into a Maelstrom
The defining image of Israel’s reaction
to the commando raid was of mobs
of young right-wing Jews, almost lost
in a sea of blue-and-white flags,
baying through the night in fury at the
Turkish embassy in TelAviv…
Jonathan Cook,
Middle East Report Online
June 16, 2010
The first reports of Israel’s May 31 commando raid on a Gaza-bound aid
flotilla surfaced among the country’s 1.4 million Palestinian citizens
alongside rumors that Sheikh Ra’id Salah, head of the radical northern wing
of the Islamic Movement of Israel, had been shot dead on the lead ship, the
Mavi Marmara. Salah is alive, but at the time his demise seemed confirmed
when it emerged that large numbers of police had been drafted into northern
Israel, where most of the Palestinian minority lives, in expectation of
widespread violence.
At the first spontaneous demonstrations in the north, participants expressed
shock that Israel had killed international peace activists in international
waters — a rumored number of 20 dead later dropped to nine. But in a
community used to intermittent bouts of extreme violence from Israel’s
security forces, few seemed to doubt that the order might have been given to
execute Salah. The sheikh, who has repeatedly been arrested and is facing a
series of trials, has long been public enemy number one among Israeli Jews
for his campaign to protect the Haram al-Sharif from what he regards as an
attempted Israeli takeover. The Haram al-Sharif is a compound of mosques in
the Old City of Jerusalem that includes al-Aqsa and is believed by Jews to
be built over two ancient Jewish temples. Half-jokingly, a protester in
Nazareth wondered aloud whether a military commander had overheard the
prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, ask: “Who will rid me of this turbulent
sheikh?”
Breaking the Siege of Gaza
The flotilla, which was attacked more than 60 miles off Israel’s coast early
in the morning, was not the first to bear aid for Gaza, but it was the first
to include a delegation of Palestinian leaders from inside Israel. Palestinians
are roughly one fifth of Israel’s population. Most of the main Israeli-Palestinian
political factions and institutions were included: Salah and his counterpart
in the Islamic Movement’s more moderate southern wing, Sheikh Hamad
Abu Da‘bas; Muhammad Zaydan, head of the Higher Follow-Up Committee,
the umbrella body dominated by local mayors; and Hanin Zu‘bi, a first-term
member of the parliament, the Knesset, from the nationalist Tajammu‘
party (Balad in Hebrew). Alongside them was Lubna Masarwa, a resident of
Kafr Qara‘ in northern Israel and an activist with the Free Gaza Movement,
which organized the aid convoy.
Before they set off, the group of Palestinian-Israelis knew their participation
would upset a broad swath of Israeli Jewish opinion. Since 2006, when
Hamas won the Palestinian Legislative Council elections, Israel has been
progressively tightening a blockade of Gaza to the point that today only a
few dozen items are allowed in and less than a quarter of the cargo trucks
that once entered the enclave each day are still permitted to do so. The
policy has become more severe as its goal has become less clear: Is it to
stop “arms smuggling” by Hamas, as Yuval Diskin, the head of the Shinbet,
Israel’s secret police, claimed on June 15; or to wage “economic warfare,”
as suggested by a recent Israeli document, punishing Gaza’s inhabitants for
voting for Hamas; or to act as leverage on Hamas to stop rocket fire on
nearby Israeli communities, although such attacks all but ceased long ago;
or to force the release of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held captive by
Hamas since 2006? Most Israeli Jews do not seem overly concerned which
justification is deployed.
Meanwhile, in strenuously denying aid agency reports that the blockade has
created a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Israeli officials have left the Jewish
majority to conclude that those who oppose the blockade do so because
they support Hamas — “a terrorist organization committed to the destruction
of Israel,” as commentators regularly remind the public. It was therefore
hardly surprising that, a few days before the flotilla set sail for Gaza on its
stated mission to “break the siege,” the popular news website Ynet claimed
that Knesset member Zu‘bi would be traveling on a ship alongside
“prominent Hamas-affiliated activists,” while the headline asked rhetorically:
“MK in Service of Hamas?”
But what Zu‘bi and the other Palestinian-Israeli leaders probably could not
have appreciated was that this flotilla, unlike its predecessors, was about
to make waves not only domestically but internationally. They were about to
be thrown into a maelstrom of events that would provoke denunciations
from around the globe, turn a spotlight on the legitimacy of Israel’s blockade,
tear apart Israel’s key regional alliance with Turkey and further embarrass
a weak US administration that is desperately trying to breathe life into a
sham Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” as its own occupations, in Iraq and
Afghanistan, continue to falter. As a result, the participation of Palestinian-
Israelis in the flotilla dangerously reinforced the Jewish majority’s perception
of the minority as a fifth column.
War and Loyalty
‘Adil Manna’*, a Palestinian historian at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem,
notes that, when Israel feels isolated and under threat, “it becomes much
more intolerant of criticism from inside the country, from the [Palestinian]
Arab minority especially. Dissent is seen as a strategic danger.” And
Israel has rarely felt so isolated or perceived its international standing to be
so threatened.
The raid on the flotilla, in which eight Turks and a dual Turkish-American
citizen were killed and dozens of other passengers wounded by Israeli
commandos, followed two regional confrontations involving Israel still at
the forefront of the international community’s memory: a month-long clash
in 2006 with the Lebanese politicalparty-cum-militia Hizballah, in which
more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians were killed; and a three-week assault on
Gaza in 2008-2009 in which some 1,400 Palestinians died, again most of them
civilians. An international consensus regarded the large-scale loss of
civilian life in both confrontations as constituting at the very minimum a
“disproportionate” Israeli response, whereas Israel maintained it had a
right to wage its own version of the “war on terror.” A UN-mandated report
on the Gaza attack by Richard Goldstone, a respected international jurist,
tipped the balance of world opinion decisively against Israel by suggesting
that, while both Israeli forces and Hamas had committed war crimes, Israeli
forces had committed the bulk of them.
As international opprobrium has grown, Israel has subjected the leaders of
its Palestinian citizens to ever greater scrutiny, not only over their
positions on the long-running conflict between Israel and the Palestinians
but also on Israel’s regional confrontation with Hizballah and wider
confrontation with the international community. In the minds of most Israeli
Jews, the question of where the Palestinian minority stands on these issues
overlaps with the question of whether Palestinians can be trustworthy
citizens. Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, and his Yisrael Beiteinu
party rode to success in the 2009 general election, winning 15 seats and
becoming the third largest faction in Knesset, by exploiting popular
suspicions of the minority with the campaign slogan, “No loyalty, no
citizenship.”
The issue of the minority’s loyalty had been widely debated since the
beginning of the second intifada, in October 2000, when Palestinian citizens
protested in support of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Police
entered their towns and villages to greet the demonstrators with rubber
bullets and live fire, killing 13 and injuring hundreds in a few days. Those
events were misleadingly presented by the Israeli leadership as an internal
uprising by rebels conspiring with the Palestinians under occupation to
overthrow the state from within.
But the 2006 bombardment of Lebanon and the later attack on Gaza have
been equally significant for majority-minority relations, expanding the
dimensions of the loyalty debate. The Jewish majority perceived these two
confrontations as the salient battles in a clash of civilizations that pitted Israel
against the region and its aspiring hegemon, Iran. The Palestinian minority,
on the other hand, regarded the confrontations as further proof that Israel
was a militarized and militaristic state with an insatiable appetite for territory
and no ability to make peace with the Palestinians and its other neighbors.
This unbridgeable gulf in worldviews was bound to set Palestinian citizens
on a collision course with their own state.
The Enemy Within
In the summer 2006 Lebanon war, Palestinian communities, like Jewish
ones, came under Hizballah rocket fire from southern Lebanon. Although 18
Palestinian citizens were killed in the north, the minority’s political
sympathies remained largely with Hasan Nasrallah, Hizballah’s leader,
throughout. Most Palestinian citizens were impressed by Nasrallah’s
knowledge of the Israeli political scene and grasp of their experiences inside
a Jewish state, and also believed — unlike their Jewish compatriots —
that Israel, not Hizballah, had willed the hostilities. But even after a truce
was called in its battle with Hizballah, Israel entered a new phase of conflict
with its Palestinian citizens. The first major political casualty would be
Azmi Bishara, the outspoken leader of the Tajammu‘ party, who had been a
thorn in Israel’s side for a decade with his popular campaign to reform
Israel from a Jewish state into a “state of all its citizens.” In the wake of the
2006 war, Bishara found himself facing a new and potent “one-size-fits-all”
accusation of spying for Hizballah. The charge, publicized by the Shinbet
while he was abroad in the spring of 2007, left him in exile.
The Gaza attack of 2008 further stoked suspicions of Palestinian citizens’
disloyalty. Reflecting the polarization of majority-minority worldviews,
demonstrations against Israel’s three-week attack on Gaza, Operation Cast
Lead, were organized and supported chiefly by the Palestinian minority.
Historians have noted the decades of quietism from the Palestinian minority
that followed Israel’s establishment in 1948. That trait can be attributed,
initially at least, to the destruction of Palestinian society before and during
the 1948 war: Most Palestinians left in the new Jewish state following
the flight of 80 percent of their compatriots lived in poor, rural communities
that had little direct involvement in national politics and were administered
by the Israeli army until 1966. For two decades, Palestinian society would
struggle to regenerate a leadership under the strictures of military rule.
When a leadership did belatedly emerge in the late 1970s and 1980s, the
minority’s representatives remained largely passive, awaiting directions from
the PLO leadership in exile. In essence, they needed an answer to the
question of what ultimate goal the Palestinian struggle aspired to: Was it to
liberate the minority from its compromised existence in a Jewish state,
presumably in some variation of the one-state model, or to trade the minority
for peace in a partitioned territory?
When the answer came with the 1993 Oslo accord — they were to remain
inside Israel as an ethnic minority — the Palestinian leadership responded
with a tentative civil rights movement aimed at ending Israel’s self-definition
as a Jewish state. Bishara’s “state of all its citizens” slogan would be the
rallying cry through the late 1990s. But the October 2000 events showed in
lethal fashion that Israel was not ready to concede, or even debate, the
privileges enjoyed by the Jewish majority. Change was not going to occur
from within.
Looking to the Outside World
Faced with Israeli intransigence, the Palestinian minority’s leadership
began looking outside Israel for support. Civil society organizations led the
way by focusing on advocacy that highlighted the minority’s plight to
international bodies such as the UN and the European Union. In quick
succession in late 2006 and early 2007, two Palestinian NGOs, Mada and
Adalah, and the Higher Follow-Up Committee each published a separate
position paper in English — collectively nicknamed the “Vision Documents”
— that argued for Israel’s transformation into a liberal democracy. The
Shinbet signaled clearly that it regarded these documents as an “existential
threat” to Israel. With the approval of the attorney general, the Shinbet’s
director, Yuval Diskin, issued a stark warning to the authors: “The Shinbet
is required to thwart subversive activity by elements who wish to harm the
nature of the State of Israel as a democratic Jewish State — even if they
act by means of democratically provided tools — by virtue of the principle
of ‘defensive democracy.’”
This political backdrop was on view as Palestinian NGOs in Israel not only
led non-violent demonstrations against Operation Cast Lead in December
2008 but also highlighted to the world the police repression of their protests,
which led to the arrest of many hundreds of activists, including children.
The involvement of Israeli-Palestinian NGOs in assisting the Goldstone
investigations in 2009 only fueled the sense among Israeli Jews that the
minority had been unmasked as a fifth column. And almost as background
music to these developments, the separate prosecutions of two Palestinian
MKs have gathered steam: Muhammad Baraka, head of the joint Palestinian-
Jewish Communist party, Jabha (Hadash in Hebrew), is charged with
attacking security personnel during protests; and Sa‘id Nafa‘, a Druze
member of the Tajammu‘ party, is to stand trial for traveling to Syria with a
delegation of Druze leaders.
In addition, since Cast Lead, Israeli-Palestinian NGOs have deepened their
solidarity with Palestinians under occupation by becoming actively engaged
in a fledgling international movement to boycott Israel. Their intimate
familiarity with the self-defined Jewish state and their direct experiences
of institutional discrimination make them persuasive advocates for such a
boycott, as Israel’s leadership appeared to appreciate. It was not surprising,
therefore, that in May Amir Makhoul, head of Ittijah, an umbrella
organization for Palestinian civil society groups in Israel, became the latest
major public figure to run afoul of the Shinbet.
During Cast Lead, Makhoul had been called in for interrogation by the
Shinbet over his role in organizing the protests, and threatened that,
if he continued his activities, he might be “disappeared to Gaza.” His brother,
‘Isam Makhoul, a former Jabha MK, said he now regarded that threat as
tellingly prophetic. In early May, Amir Makhoul was arrested and effectively
“disappeared” when a blanket gag order was imposed on his detention.
The gag was only lifted when word spread on the Internet. After nearly two
weeks, during which time Makhoul was denied access to lawyers and says
he was repeatedly tortured, the Shinbet had the confession they were seeking.
(At the same time, another community activist, ‘Umar Sa‘id, was arrested.
Apparently his confession will provide a vital link in the Shinbet’s claims
against Makhoul.) In a pattern now becoming familiar, Makhoul was charged
with spying on behalf of Hizballah, supposedly providing the Lebanese
militia with the locations of security facilities and, more vaguely, helping
it with analyses of Israeli society and political trends.
Kidnapped on the High Seas
Following the May 31 attack on the flotilla, Palestinians inside Israel waited
anxiously all day for news of Sheikh Ra’id Salah’s condition, and that
of the other four Israeli-Palestinian participants, as nearly 700 peace activists
were forcibly brought to the Israeli port of Ashdod on their captured
vessels. As the world debated the finer points of maritime law, Palestinian
citizens who are Muslims wondered whether their state’s act of piracy —
or “state-sponsored terrorism,” as the Higher Follow-Up Committee referred
to it — had included executing their spiritual leader. In Umm al-Fahm,
Salah’s home town in northern Israel, stone-throwing youths and police
briefly clashed. Apparently keen to preempt further damage to Israel’s image
from the sheikh’s presumed death, the Israeli media reported that
commandos had fired at Salah in an act of self-defense, after shots had been
seen coming from his cabin. Later, Salah’s wife was escorted to a hospital
operating room by Israeli officials who appeared to believe the sheikh was
the seriously injured man on the operating table. He was not.
A little more than 24 hours after the Israeli navy’s raid, it emerged that
Salah and three other Israeli-Palestinians had been remanded into custody
for a week, while suspicions that they had attacked the commandos were
investigated. The next day, June 2, as Israel was forced to release the
international peace activists under severe US and Turkish pressure, Adalah,
a legal center for the Palestinian minority, pointed out that the four were
facing “selective” investigation and possible prosecution for alleged acts
committed outside Israel’s jurisdiction. The courts released them to a week
of house arrest, though they are still being investigated for possession of
weapons and conspiracy to commit an offense, and are banned from leaving
the country. Salah’s release provoked a flood of complaints from Jewish
politicians. A typical response came from Yisrael Hasson, of the supposedly
centrist Kadima party and a former deputy head of the Shinbet, who equated
the release of Salah with that of the late Sheikh Ahmad Yasin, founder of
Hamas. “In 1997 Bibi [Netanyahu] and Lieberman released Sheikh Yasin, and
in 2010, they’re releasing Salah,” he said. (Yasin was assassinated by Israel
in 2004.)
In his court appearance, Salah confirmed the minority’s suspicions of an
attempted assassination, saying the “soldiers tried to kill me. They fired in
the direction of someone else they thought was me.” Salah’s deputy, Sheikh
Kamil Khatib, claimed Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak had
plotted to kill the sheikh.
One of the first people on the flotilla to be released, on the morning
following the commando attack, was Hanin Zu‘bi, after police were advised
that her parliamentary immunity ruled out her continuing detention.
In the short time she was held, however, she says she was interviewed three
times by police, who questioned her about possessing a weapon. Zu‘bi
hurried back to her home town of Nazareth to hold a press conference. She
offered an account of the commando raid that would be substantiated by the
other passengers after their release but at this early stage was chiefly
notable for conflicting in almost every respect with a narrative being hastily
constructed by Israeli officials. Israel, which had seized all the passengers’
cameras and video equipment, slowly released heavily edited, and in some
cases doctored, video and audio footage to try to support its claims.
(Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian-American in the convoy, identified her own
voice in recorded transmissions said by Israel to be from the Mavi Marmara.
But Arraf had been aboard a smaller vessel.)
Israel argued that many of the passengers had been armed with knives and
even guns; that they had attacked and tried to “lynch” soldiers who arrived
“almost barefoot,” as minister Benny Begin told the BBC; that several
soldiers had been “kidnapped” and their lives put at risk by armed
passengers; and that the soldiers had held off opening fire until the last
possible moment, when their lives were in substantial danger. To make this
improbable story seem more plausible, Israel’s deputy foreign minister,
Danny Ayalon, also claimed that many of the passengers, particularly the
Turkish contingent belonging to an Islamic humanitarian organization, were
really terrorists allied with al-Qaeda — an allegation the Foreign Ministry
eventually had to withdraw, though the claim that there were terrorists on
board the Mavi Marmara was maintained.
Zu‘bi, by contrast, argued that their ships had been attacked far out in
international waters in darkness, creating confusion and panic; that the navy
had opened fire on the lead ship, the Mavi Marmara, where most of the
activists were, before a single commando had stepped onto the deck; that she
was sure there were no weapons on board the Marmara and that a later search
by the navy that she witnessed revealed none; that two of the three bodies
she saw had gunshot wounds to the head, indicating executions (later
autopsies in Turkey would reveal five had wounds to the head, and that the
nine dead had been shot a total of 30 times, often from close range); and
that she had witnessed two passengers slowly bleed to death after her
attempts to alert the soldiers in Hebrew were ignored. She concluded: “Israel
had days to plan this military operation. They wanted many deaths to
terrorize us and to send a message that no future aid convoys should try to
break the siege of Gaza.”
Fisticuffs in the Knesset
A brief but stormy debate between Palestinian and Jewish MKs on Israel’s
attack on the aid flotilla took place the next day, June 2, but was cut short by
Matan Vilnai, the deputy defense minister, who transferred it to the less
public arena of the foreign affairs committee. Zu‘bi, however, managed to
revive the debate in the chamber by demanding her right to make a
five-minute statement. The ensuing scenes took aback even seasoned
politicians such as Yossi Sarid, a dovish former minister. He observed: “For
the first time in its history, the Knesset came dangerously close to fisticuffs,
with only a small step separating an exchange of words and an exchange
of blows.”
Many MKs, including ministers, had left the chamber in protest as Zu‘bi rose
to speak. As she stood at the podium, a deputy speaker who had been left
in charge struggled to contain the outpouring of loathing directed at Zu‘bi as
Jewish parliamentarians shouted the epithets “traitor,” “terrorist” and worse
at the novice legislator. Anastasia Michaeli, a far-right MK from Lieberman’s
party, charged the podium and was intercepted by security guards as she
tried to grab Zu‘bi. (Michaeli was later invited to address an anti-violence
conference sponsored by the Interior Ministry in which she defended
her actions, saying: “I couldn’t allow myself to stay silent. I acted out of a
conviction that we will not allow anyone to harm Israel’s sovereignty.”) After
five minutes of pandemonium, the speaker, Reuven Rivlin, arrived to
try to restore order. Despite a dozen MKs being ejected, Zu‘bi barely uttered
a few sentences, between long enforced pauses as MKs spewed out abuse
and personal insults — including one who yelled “Check if she has a knife!”
— before Rivlin brought her speech to an abrupt end.
Some observers were surprised that the insults hurled at Zu‘bi were not
restricted to the right-wing MKs. In fact, legislators from the opposition
Kadima party were as vehement and abusive in their denunciations. One,
Yulia Shamalov Berkovitz, called out that the Palestinian MKs were
“parliamentary spies.” Zu‘bi, an articulate woman who previously headed a
media monitoring center, deftly pressed the buttons most likely to produce
uproar in the Knesset. In her brief address, she told the MKs that it was
a “mitzvah,” or Jewish holy commandment, to join the flotilla and break the
siege of Gaza; she called for an international inquiry to hold Israel to
account; and she demanded the return of photographs and video footage
confiscated from the passengers, noting that this evidence would prove who
was telling the truth about what had occurred.
Sarid, the former leader of Israel’s tiny left-Zionist party, Meretz, may have
been appalled by the behavior in the chamber but he was no more
sympathetic to Zu‘bi than the rioting MKs. He did not accuse her of treason
like the right wing, but he was equally dismissive of her participation in the
flotilla. He blamed her for grandstanding and, smugly positioning himself
as if separating disputatious children, castigated her in the same terms as her
near-assailant Michaeli. “Don’t think for a moment that the vitriol on either
side was born of genuine outrage. Everything was pre-planned and
calculated to gain the public’s adoration, whatever the constituency,” he
observed.
A Darker Agenda
Sarid’s putdown was by far the gentlest treatment Zu‘bi would receive at the
hands of Jewish politicians, public and the local media. In a poll conducted
by Tel Aviv University for Ha’aretz, 80 percent of Israeli Jews said they
thought Zu‘bi should be punished for joining the flotilla. Shortly after her
Knesset appearance, a Facebook page in Hebrew was set up calling for her
execution, quickly garnering thousands of members who appeared
unashamed to put their names to such a campaign. Death threats poured into
Zu‘bi’s office — more than were ever sent to Azmi Bishara, according to
Zu‘bi’s assistant who once ran Bishara’s office — and flowed at a lesser rate
into the offices of the other Palestinian MKs as well. Overnight Zu‘bi had
swept Salah from the top slot in the Jewish majority’s list of monsters.
Knesset officials outfitted Zu‘bi with a bodyguard after the Shinbet reported
that it was aware of more than a dozen concrete plots to kill her.
The focus in the days following the commando raid has been chiefly on Zu‘bi.
Eli Yishai, the interior minister and demagogic leader of the ultra-Orthodox
Shas party, got the ball rolling by announcing that he was applying to the
attorney general for approval to revoke Zu‘bi’s citizenship. Legal safeguards
should mean he is unlikely to succeed, but the struggle to do so will
strengthen the right and weaken the already besieged legal establishment in
Israel. Yishai has also promised to present legislation to revoke the citizenship
[of] anyone defined as a traitor, saying of such a bill: “I believe most of the
people support this and that the Supreme Court will accept it.”
In a further indication of the right’s ascendancy, the Knesset’s house
committee agreed a week after the attack on the flotilla to strip Zu‘bi of
several parliamentary privileges, including banning her from leaving the
country by confiscating her diplomatic passport and denying her the right to
claim legal costs — moves that are designed to look as though the ground is
being prepared to put her on trial. State prosecutors told the committee
that she is still being investigated for attempting to enter a closed military
zone (that is, Gaza) and violence against commandos. Yariv Levin, head
of the committee and a senior member of Netanyhu’s Likud party, claimed:
“The committee’s decision expresses the feelings of the entire nation that
harsh steps should be taken against MKs who harm Israel Defense Forces
soldiers and question our ability to be here. MK Zu‘bi now knows that she
will be made to foot the bill for her behavior.”
The campaign to denigrate Zu‘bi, as Levin’s comment and Yishai’s proposed
bill suggest, has been hijacked by a darker agenda of suggesting more
generally the treachery of the Palestinian leadership in Israel and, mostly
implicitly so far, the Palestinian citizens whom they represent. The most
significant move against the minority since the commando raid was the
submission of a bill — already nicknamed the “Zu‘bi law” — that would allow
a sitting MK to be expelled from the parliament if he or she does any of
the following: deny Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state; incite
racism; or support the armed struggle of a terrorist group. Given the highly
distorted definitions used in Israeli political discourse, such legislation could
easily be used to expel all ten of the Palestinian MKs serving in Palestinian
parties or the joint Palestinian-Jewish Communist party. The bill’s backers
appear to believe that this may be a more effective way to ban the Palestinian
parties than their previous attempts during general election campaigns
through the partisan Central Elections Committee. The courts have
consistently, if narrowly, overturned the Committee’s decisions.
The Zu‘bi law is only the latest in a steady stream of what have been termed
“loyalty laws” submitted since Netanyahu came to power in 2009. Ja‘far
Farah, director of the Mossawa advocacy group for the Palestinian minority,
says 23 bills have been proposed to limit the freedoms and rights of
Palestinian citizens or their leaders over the past year. The flagrantly
anti-democratic nature of these bills has resulted in most being rejected at
an early stage by a ministerial committee on the advice of legal officials. But
as pressure builds — and incidents like Makhoul’s arrest and Zu‘bi’s
defense of the aid flotilla outrage the Jewish majority — breaches in the
dam are widening. The Nakba Law, which can be used to end state funding
for any organization or institution that commemorates the dispossession
of the Palestinians in the 1948 war, is the most notable to have passed. Many
similar loyalty bills directed at the minority and their leaders are in the
pipeline. One being considered would require MKs to swear allegiance to
Israel as a Jewish and Zionist state, and another would revoke the citizenship
of anyone convicted of spying or terrorism.
In a commentary in the liberal Ha’aretz newspaper, Ruth Gavison, a
distinguished law professor and founder of the Association for Civil Rights
in Israel, the oldest and largest human rights group in the country, hinted
at an emerging Jewish consensus against the Palestinian minority that cuts
across all Jewish political divisions. While denouncing the demagoguery of
the right, she observed that “it can be argued — even if it is not necessary
to do so — that participation in international activities likely to embarrass the
state and thwart its policies (such as unofficial visits to enemy states)
should be seen as reason enough to prevent a person from serving as a
member of Knesset, in accordance with reasonable judicial review process.”
Darker Still
Unlike the case of Operation Cast Lead, protests by Palestinian citizens
against the lethal raid on the aid flotilla have been mostly muted, apart from
the brief period when it appeared that Salah might have been killed.
The relative quiet may in part reflect the short timeline of the events: The
last peace activists had been deported within three days. But the strength of
feeling among the minority was evident from the strict observation of a
general strike called for June 1 by the Palestinian leadership. More likely,
the reluctance by Palestinian citizens to come out onto the streets to protest
can be ascribed to the current political climate in Israel. When Palestinian
students demonstrated alongside small numbers of Jewish left-wing activists
in the main universities, their numbers were dwarfed by counter-
demonstrations by right-wing students, mobilized by a rapidly growing
nationalist youth movement called Im Tirtzu. The defining image of Israel’s
reaction to the commando raid was of mobs of young right-wing Jews,
almost lost in a sea of blue-and-white flags, baying through the night in
fury at the Turkish embassy in Tel Aviv.
If the blockade on Gaza is justified in the minds of Israeli Jews as collective
punishment of the enclave’s Palestinian population for supporting Hamas,
a similar skewed logic is being applied to Israel’s Palestinian citizens.
According to this thinking, those who sent Zu‘bi to the Knesset and those
who revere Salah should be held accountable — and punished — for their
representatives’ actions. The minority seems only too aware that the calls to
expel Zu‘bi from the Knesset or revoke her citizenship will not end there. A
poll by Haifa University in May showed that 62 percent of Palestinian
citizens feared they are under threat of expulsion from Israel. And Israel’s
mood is likely to grow darker still.
Jonathan Cook is a British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His reports
on Israel-Palestine have been published in numerous journals and websites
including the Guardian, the Observer, the Times, Al Jazeera, New Statesman,
International Herald Tribune, Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo), The National
(Abu Dhabi), Electronic Intifada and Counterpunch. His latest book is
Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books,
2009). His two earlier books are Blood and Religion and Israel and the Clash of
Civilisations (Pluto Books, 2006, 2008). Visit his website:
http://www.jkcook.net/index.html
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