If You Oppose Zionism's Genocidal Ethnic Cleansing Project You Must
Support the Zionism is Racism Motion & Oppose My Expulsion
Polanski Declares that he's an
anti-Zionist at the Board Of Deputies Hustings
Dear
Zack,
Your
clear and explicit declaration at the Board
of Deputies hustings that you are an anti-Zionist is to be welcomed. I
unreservedly support your candidature at the forthcoming Holborn & St.
Pancras by-election and I hope that you are the successor to the detested war
criminal Keir Starmer who slithered away like the snake he is.
Whereas
I supported
George Galloway at the Rochdale by-election in 2024 I am firmly opposed
to his divisive and reactionary candidacy in this election.
Polanski opposes 'divisive' Zionism is Racism motion
However
I am also aware that after winning
the leadership of the Green Party [GP] so decisively last year, you equivocated
on the question of Zionism and appeased the old Green Establishment of Caroline
Lucas and co. So the question is whether you are prepared to break with the GP's support for NATO and imperialism?
The Daily Mail's Proprietor Viscount Rothermere waxed lyrical about the 'youthfulness' and dynamism of the Nazis
In
your Zeteo interview
you stated that ‘Zionism means different
things to different people.’ But that is true of any ideology. Do you think
that the Nazis came to power promising to wipe out all Jews? On the contrary
they played down anti-Semitism.
The
Nazis were seen as a vigorous, young movement that was going to do away with
the old corrupt politicians and abolish unemployment. People supported them not
because of anti-Semitism but their economic promises and anti-communism.
South Africa had petty apartheid, which Israel didn't have until the advent of colonisation of the West Bank where there are now roads for Jews only - they don't have signs but that is the reality
Apartheid
in South Africa was not defended by its supporters as a way of exploiting and
oppressing Black people but as "separate development".
The Nationalists argued that South Africa was not one nation, but a multitude
of ‘nations’ (Afrikaners, English-speaking whites and various Black ethnic
groups).
The
Apartheid leaders claimed that forcing different cultures to integrate would
lead to friction and that each group should live independently within its own
territory. This is no different to what Zionism argues. Jews need their own
state.
Israeli Labor leaders Ben-Gurion & Golda Meir. Ben-Gurion was the architect of the Nakba & Gold Meir was famous for saying that 'It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist,”
The Israeli Labor Party’s support for a two state
solution was posited on the
need to separate Jews from Palestinians in order to maintain a Jewish
majority in Israel. Only then could Israel be both democratic and Jewish. In
the words
of Israel’s main opposition leader, Yair Lapid:
My principle says maximum Jews on maximum land
with maximum security and with minimum Palestinians.
You
went on to say that what the present Israeli government is doing is clearly
racist thus implying that previous Israeli Labor governments weren’t racist.
But this is not true. There is nothing that Netanyahu and Likud have done that
the Labour Zionists didn’t do before them. The right-wing Zionists are just
more honest.
The
Nakba wasn’t organised by the Revisionists but the Labour
Zionists. It was primarily the ‘left’ Zionist militias, Haganah and
Palmach, who were responsible for the massacres and forcible expulsion of
Palestinians in 1947/8 and throughout the 1950s.
The
Apartheid structure of the Israeli state, with its confiscation of Arab land and
apartheid legislation like the Absentee
Property Law was created by Labour not Likud. The concept of ‘Jewish’
Labour, i.e. violently picketing Jewish employers who employed Arabs was a
Labour Zionist campaign in the 1920s and 30s.
Yes
many Jews see Israel as a refuge from anti-Semitism but as the Jews of
Argentina, 3,000 of whom were murdered, found out in the
1970s, the Israeli state will offer no protection against an anti-Jewish regime
with which it is on friendly terms and doing business with the Israeli state. Israel preferred a billion dollar trade with a neo-Nazi Junta to saving Argentinian Jews from the torture chambers.
Just
as in 1920 thousands of Ukrainian Jews fleeing
the pogroms were turned
away by the Zionists who pressurised the British not to admit them.
Zionism
is not what is in the head of some fragrant young Zionist but what Zionism
does. Jewish or Zionist justifications for Zionism are about as valid as the
defence of Apartheid in South Africa by its supporters.
Zionism
is not a Jewish but a Christian idea. Zionism is the ideology of the Israeli
state. It explains why Palestinian children are called ‘little
snakes’ by former Israeli 'Justice Minister' Ayelet Shaked, legitimate targets for IDF snipers. Zionism, in all its flavours
is first and foremost a movement of Jewish Supremacy, ethnic cleansing and now
genocide.
Yes
Zionism has had many different strands and currents but all of them were united
on the need for a Jewish Supremacist state.
Supporters of South African Apartheid were divided between Jan
Smuts and Daniël Malan. Both however agreed on White Supremacism. The Nazi
party too was divided
between Hitler and the ‘left’ represented by Gregor and Otto Strasser. However
both wings agreed on anti-Semitism.
One
of your objections to the ZIR motion was ‘safeguarding
Jewish people’. This is wrong. Supporting Palestinians and opposing Zionism
does not threaten Jewish safety. If anything increases anti-Semitism it is the
Zionist claim that all Jews support the genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
If some Jewish Greens are Zionists then far more are anti-Zionist. If you are a Zionist then you are supporting a racist, apartheid state. Why would such a person want to be in the GP?
Jewish
people are not under attack, their homes are not being bombed, their children
killed, their doctors tortured and raped to death. When the question of
Palestine is raised it has nothing to do with Jews. To imply that support for
Palestinians threatens the safety of Jews is to buy into the Zionist narrative.
Israel is not a ‘Jewish’ state other than in a racial supremacist sense.
Those
Jews at the Board
of Deputies hustings who shouted that there is no genocide were no
different from neo-Nazi holocaust deniers. They are racist monsters and should
be treated as such.
The
Jewish racists who heckled you would change their tune if it was 20,000 Jewish
children who had been murdered. Jewish people in Britain are not experiencing
anti-Semitism but a reaction to the carnage most of them support.
Allegations
of ‘anti-Semitism’ are nothing more than a rationale to support the Zionist agenda.
Jews in Britain who declare they are Zionists are holding hands with the
far-right and people like Tommy Robinson, a self-declared Zionist.
You
raised the red herring about someone who opposes genocide & apartheid but
is a member of a Zionist synagogue. You said they should not be treated differently
or made to feel unwelcome. I agree. People who are members of Zionist
synagogues should not be held responsible for the politics of their synagogue
if they oppose Zionism.
Your
second objection was about supporting a single Palestinian state. You even said
that there was ‘something imperialist
about this’. This is untrue. Palestine today is already one state. An apartheid
state. There is no possibility of a two state solution nor is it desirable
since it would leave an apartheid Jewish state in place. What is required is
that there are equal rights for all the inhabitants of that state. What is
imperialist about equal rights?
If
you ask any Palestinian whether they would prefer one state or two states the
overwhelming majority opt for the former. The Palestinian Liberation
Organisation only adopted support for 2 states because they despaired of achieving
a single state. Today it is clear to all that, in the words
of B’tselem, Israel’s main human rights organisation, Israel is a
regime of Jewish
supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid
In 1919 Chaim Weizmann, later to become
Israel’s first President, stated that a Jewish state would be ‘as Jewish as England was English.’ In other
words its indigenous population would have no place.
A Jewish ethno-nationalist state cannot be any
other than a racist, apartheid state. By definition it is a state that
privileges Jews.
Crispin Flintoff Interviews Chris
Williamson and Natalie Strecker about Zack Polanski
I
also wish to raise my expulsion from the GP, which you have kept quiet about.
It was planned and executed by a small group on the Green Party Council [GPC] led
by Laura Eccott and supported by Green supporters of Zionism and genocide like
Elise Benjamin. It was agreed by the narrowest of margins 7-6.
The Racism of Elise Benjamin – the Green Party’s
leading Zionist
According
to Benjamin the Nakba is ‘Iran backed propaganda’
the Palestinians being too stupid to have thought of it themselves. She also repeats
the fable of an Israeli ‘offer’ to allow the Palestinian refugees to return. Wikipedia’s
1949 Lausanne Conference
dispels this nonsense. There was an ‘offer’ to accept 100,000 refugees but it was
quickly withdrawn and in return Israel wanted a portion of southern Lebanon and
other territories
Benjamin
fawns over a White Israeli woman, Izabella Gandlin who was apparently killed by
Palestinians (we will never know because it is likely that most Israelis who died
on October 7 were victims of the Hannibal Directive. Benjamin never profiles Palestinian
children or doctors like Dr Abu Safia who to this day is imprisoned and tortured
by Israel. Indeed not once has Benjamin said anything about the genocide, starvation
and torture.
In response to an article about Israel’s sexual assault on Palestinian girls, Benjamin reaches for another Zionist fabrication about Hamas intercepting aid and abusing Palestinian women. She also only has words for the fake allegations of mass rape on October 7, not the documented and videod IDF rape of Palestinians.
Suspension & Expulsion
On April 16 I was suspended. The complainant was
allowed to remain anonymous contrary to GP policy.
Just 11 words justified my suspension: ‘Documented
history of antisemitism, including court decisions and recent terrorism
charges’
On May 7 I was expelled, the reasons being that I
had:
‘displayed
no contrition or regret (or remorse)’ for ‘the repeated instances of anti-Semitism that led to TG’s suspension.’
That I had had the audacity to publicly criticise those who had engineered my expulsion.
My expulsion was based on a series of lies. ‘Repeated Anti-Semitism’ was not a
reason for my suspension so how could I show contrition?If the GP wishes to expel anyone then it should be those who make
false allegations of anti-Semitism - Elise Benjamin, Laura Eccott and Andrei
Frieze. It is the Green racists not the Green anti-racists who should be expelled.
I was also suspended for the ‘crime’ of being charged
with ‘terrorism’. Thousands of people face ‘terrorism’ charges today for
supporting Palestine Action. The most recent
Home Office statistics reveal that the average ‘terrorist’ is no longer a
31 year old male but a 59 year old White woman.
The GPC assumed that being charged ‘terrorism’ meant
that I was guilty. GPC acted contrary to one of the most basic principles of
law, the right to be treated as innocent until proven guilty. It is enshrined
in Article
6(2) of the European Convention on Human Rights. I completely understand why Laura Eccott and Elise Benjamin
prefer Israeli ‘justice’, where you are assumed to be guilty and gaoled without
even the pretence of a trial (if you are a Palestinian).
On August 18 I went on trial under the Terrorism Act
2000. It ended on August 21 when the jury unanimously
acquitted me after just 2 hours. They accepted that what was at stake was
freedom of speech not terrorism. I was fortunate that the jury did not consist
of members of Green Party Council.
My closing
speech to the jury was described by the right-wing Libertarian Alliance as ‘maybe the most important speech made this century in
an English court of law’. I
explained why the Terrorism Act 2000 was not about terrorism but about
suppressing free speech. It is something that members of GPC might take the
time to acquaint themselves with.
It is bad enough that the British state accuses Palestine
activists and protesters against the banning of Palestine Action of terrorism. What
is grotesque is the fact that the GPC gave their support to those accusations.
Zionism is a reflection of the European racism that
led to the Holocaust. The Palestinians are the Jews of Israel. Christian Zionism
predated
Jewish Zionism by 4 centuries. It believed in the idea of a ‘Jewish return to
Palestine’ an anti-Semitic idea which assumed that Jews do not belong where
they live.
44% of young British
Jews now declare that they are anti-Zionist or non-Zionist. The GP no
longer needs to walk in fear of the ‘anti-Semitism’ scarecrow. The GP needs to
abandon support for Zionism and become an anti-racist and anti-imperialist party.
The GP has the most pro-Palestinian policy of any
political party yet it is distrusted by Palestine solidarity supporters because
its main interest lies in harvesting the votes of those opposed to genocide rather
than putting its policies into practice.
The IHRA
Definition of Anti-Semitism is still GP policy and you have said nothing
about this. Recently New South Wales Supreme Court Judge Desmond Fagan ruled
that the IHRA:
propounds a concept different from that which
‘antisemitism’ has long been understood to describe and appropriates that word
to the novel concept.... The [purpose of IHRA] is to graft onto the community’s
abhorrence of antisemitism a parasitic rejection of protest against Israel.
The GP Establishment has mobilised against the
Zionism is Racism motion and you Zack have equivocated. It is time for you to come
out in its support now you are an anti-Zionist.
James Baldwin
The West’s support for Israel has nothing to do with
the Holocaust. Jews are the moral alibi for a racist state guarding Western
interests in the Arab East. As James
Baldwin remarked:
But the state of Israel was not created for the
salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western
interests.
The real problem is the GP’s fear of breaking with the
foreign policy consensus between Labour and the Tories. The question is whether
you want to break from that or adapt to it.
For nearly 20 years Israeli Arabs lived under military rule – not
because they were a Fifth Column but to prevent them returning to the land that
had stolen been from them
Haganah terrorists expelling Palestinian refugees from Haifa
Israel
is a state that has been built on myths – whether it is that ‘god’ gave the
settlers the land of the Palestinians or the fiction that in 1948, the Palestinians
miraculously ran away on the orders of the Arab states in order that a Jewish state
could be created. As Ilan
Pappe, Benny
Morris and other historians have demonstrated, the Palestinians left
because they were forced to do so.
I
have previously
covered the topic of the desperate efforts of the Israeli state to prevent
the truth emerging. This has taken the form of reclassifying documents that
have been released to historians, presumably on the assumption that they were
not copied and therefore any one quoting from them can’t prove that what they
said is true.
At the end of this article
in Ha’aretz, Adam Raz quotes the cynical comments of Yehiel
Horev, the former director of the Malmab, the secretive Defence Ministry unit
which is dedicated to rewriting the history of the Israeli military’s deeds. In
an interview he made his purposes crystal clear:
“When the
state imposes confidentiality, the published work is weakened… If someone writes
that the horse is black, if the horse isn’t outside the barn, you can’t prove
that it’s really black.”
Of
course all nations based their identity on myths such as the tales of King
Arthur and his knights. Israel’s national myths are not just about ancient
tales of kings but about recent events where the evidence is crystal
clear.Myths that are national lies with
the sole purpose of legitimising the theft of land.
Before and after - the Palestinian Al Hambra cinema in 1937 and today a Church of Scientology centre
From
1949 to 1966 Israel’s Arab population was kept under military government. They
could not leave their villages without permission. As is the case with
everything in Israel the excuse was that the Arabs were a fifth column, a
security threat.
We
now know, as the article by Adam Raz explains, that this was never true and was
not believed by the military establishment either. The purpose of military rule
was in order to prevent Israel’s Arabs, who had often been displaced by the
fighting from their villages, from returning to their land.
A law, the Absentee Property Law was
passed in 1950 with the specific purpose of defining the property of persons who were expelled, fled or left
the country after 29 November 1947 as well as their property (land, houses, bank
accounts etc.), as “absentees”.
Property belonging to absentees was placed under the control of the Custodian
for Absentees’ Property. The Absentees’ Property Law 1950 was the main legal
instrument used by Israel to take possession of the land belonging to the
internal and external Palestinian refugees.
Zionists loot a sofa from a Palestinian house (left) and today (right)
An Orwellian category Present-Absentees
was created. You could be present in Israel, having not been expelled, and
still be absent.Even if you left your
house in 1948 because of the fighting or you were forced out by the Haganah you
were still counted as an Internally Displaced Person. Of course Israeli Jews who
were forced to leave their homes faced no such prohibition.
It is estimated today that 1
in 4 Israeli Palestinians are Internally Displaced Persons. That lies at the
root of inequality in Israel, an inequality emphasised by the Jewish Nation State
Law that made ‘Jewish settlement’ into a national virtue.
Palestinians are not
permitted to live in the homes they formerly lived in, even if they were in
the same area, the property still exists, and they can show that they own it. [Tom
Segev, 1949: The First Israelis, pp. 68-91].
However
it was one thing to pass a racist law but it was another thing to implement
that law. Israeli Palestinians desired nothing more than to return to where
they were living but for Zionism, all wings of the Zionist movement including
the ‘left’Mapam, it was an article of
faith that no Palestinian should ever return to their home even if they only
moved a mile away for safety.
Thus
it was that military rule was instituted over Israel’s Palestinian population.By forbidding them to leave their villages
without permission it made it that much easier to prevent unauthorised access
to their previous homes. This was necessary because although Zionist settlers
moved into their former villages this took time, not least because at that time
there weren’t enough Zionist settlers.
Thus
Israel was born in a fit of ethnic cleansing and today the job of Malmad and
the Ministry of Defence is to keep documents of the time secret and hidden and
to perpetuate the myth that the Palestinian refugees left of their own accord.
We should bear this in mind when Israel's racist Ambassador to London, Tzipi Hotoveli, states that the Nakba and the forcible expulsion and dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 was an 'Arab lie'. It is a Zionist lie that there was no expulsion and the fact that that lie is written into Israeli law makes no difference whatsoever.
A document
unsealed after 60 years reveals the Israeli government’s secret intentions
behind the imposition of a military government on the country’s Arab citizens
in 1948: not to enhance security but to ensure Jewish control of the land
Arabs awaiting a security check in Kfar Qasem, during the War of
Independence.GPO
Israel’s defense establishment has for years endeavored to conceal
historical documentation in various archives around the country, as was
revealed in an article in Haaretz last July.
That article, which followed up on a study by the Akevot Institute for
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research, noted that for closed to 20 years, the
staff at Malmab – the Defense Ministry’s secretive security department (the
name is a Hebrew acronym for “director of security of the defense
establishment”) – had
been visiting public and private archives and forcing their directors to
mothball documents relating to Israeli history, with special emphasis on
the Arab-Israeli conflict. This was done without legal authority. The article
sparked a furor, and dozens of researchers and historians urged the defense
minister at the time, Benjamin Netanyahu, to halt the clandestine illegal
activity. Their appeal received no response.
When the state imposes
confidentiality, the published work is weakened… If someone writes that the
horse is black, if the horse isn’t outside the barn, you can’t prove that it’s
really black.
What sort of documents did Malmab order the directors to hide away in
their archives’ safes? The many and varied examples include: thick files kept
by the military government under which Israel’s Arab citizens lived for 18
years; testimony about the looting and destruction of Arab villages during the
Independence War; cabinet ministers’ comments on the Arab refugee situation,
following that war; evidence of acts of expulsion and testimony about camps set
up for captives; information about Israel’s nuclear project; documents relating
to various foreign policy issues; and even a letter sent by the poet and
Holocaust survivor Abba Kovner about his own anti-Arab sentiments.
It’s not clear whether Malmab has reduced its activity in the archives
since the article was published. However, it can be said that during the past
six months, files earlier ordered closed by Malmab have been reopened, adding
to our knowledge of the history of the two peoples who share this land. Though
none are earth-shattering in historical significance, these are important
documents that shed light on significant aspects of various events.
One such document is a secret codicil to a report drawn up by the
government-appointed Ratner Committee in early 1956. The document, restored
from oblivion in a safe at the Yad Yaari Research and Documentation Center at
Givat Haviva, is titled, “Security Settlement and the Land Question.”
The importance of the information included in the codicil can be seen
within the context of the history of the military government imposed on
Israel’s Arabs in 1948, just months after independence, and abolished only in
1966. There were about 156,000 Arabs in Israel at the war’s end. Following the
armistice agreement with Jordan (April 1949) and the annexation of the Triangle
– a concentration of Arab locales in central Israel – 27 villages, from Kafr
Qasem in the south to Umm al-Fahm in the north, also fell under the
jurisdiction of the military government.
Administratively, the latter was divided into three regions: north,
center (Triangle) and Negev. Sixty percent of Israel’s Arab citizens lived in
Galilee, 20 percent in the Triangle and the rest in the Negev and in various
so-called mixed cities, such as Haifa and Acre. In practice, about 85 percent
of all Arab citizens were under the rule of the military government, subject to
night-time curfews and regulations requiring them to obtain a travel permit
before leaving their area of residence.
The military government was based on the Defense (Emergency)
Regulations, promulgated in 1945 by British mandatory authorities, and invoked
by Israel to facilitate supervision of the movement and settlement of its Arab
citizens, and to prevent their return to the areas captured by Jewish forces in
the Independence War. The Jewish public was told that the purpose of the
military government was to deter hostile actions against the state by its Arab
citizens. In practice, however, it only exacerbated the enmity between the two
peoples.
The secret addendum. Described the military government as a tool in the struggle against Arab "trespassers.
The military government, an ugly episode in Israeli history, was the
subject of severe criticism at the time, not least by certain members of the
Jewish community. Various parties on both the left and the right – Ahdut
Ha’avodah, Mapam, the Communist Party and Herut (precursor of Likud) – objected,
each for its own reasons, to its imposition. One reason for the opposition was
that, as early as the early 1950s, the Shin Bet security service had concluded
that the country’s Arab citizens did not pose any sort of security risk.
Opinion was also divided in Mapai, the ruling party (precursor of
Labor). The state committee that was headed by Prof. Yohanan Ratner, a retired
general and architect, was the second body appointed to consider whether the
military government was necessary. The first, convened by Prime Minister David
Ben-Gurion, in 1949, had decided to leave the status quo in place. In February
1956, the three members of the Ratner Committee reached the unanimous
conclusion that “the military government has been reduced as much as it can be,
and there is no place for a further reduction.” That this was probably a
foregone conclusion is attested to by a remark made in public by a member of
that panel, Daniel Auster (mayor of Jerusalem until 1950): “Of 200,000 Arabs
and other minorities now residing in Israel, we did not find one who is loyal
to the state.”
Secret action
A few years later, in the early 1960s, when pressure mounted to abolish
the military government, Ben-Gurion explained that it was still essential in
order to prevent an insurrection by the country’s Arabs. The state’s existence
depends on the presence of the military government, he maintained, although he
did not mention the opposition to it of the security establishment. However, it
gradually became clear that what truly interested the advocates of the
government was not security but control over land. That had been facilitated by
Article 125 of the Defense (Emergency) Regulations (1945), under which a
military commander can issue an order to close “any area or place.”
In a closed meeting of the Mapai leadership, in 1962, Ben-Gurion stated
that without article 125, “we would not have been able to do what we did” in
the Negev and Galilee. “Northern Galilee is Judenrein [empty of Jews],” he
warned.
“We will find ourselves in that situation for many years if we do not
prevent – by means of Article 125, by administrative force and military force –
entry into forbidden areas. And in the eyes of the Arabs these forbidden areas
are theirs. Because the land of Ayalon [Valley] is Arab land.”
Despite the inherent logic of this argument, few testimonies exist about
the military government’s latent nationalist motivations. For one thing, there
was a tacit understanding, rarely violated, that this was not a subject for
public discussion. The secret appendix to the Ratner Committee’s report, found
in the Yaari Archives and in the State Archives, and being published here for
the first time, is highly illuminating about the true motives that guided the
country’s leaders.
According to the panel, the army alone could not safeguard state lands:
only Jewish settlement – “security settlement,” as it was called – could do
that in the long run. It was thus essential to establish Jewish settlements in
the three geographical zones overseen by the military government. Such a
process, however, would be lengthy, the committee members agreed, and in the
meantime Arab citizens uprooted in the war wanted to return to their homes –
something that could not be prevented through legislation. In the view of the
codicil’s framers, “The laxness [by the Arabs] in seizing these areas is due
mainly to the fact these areas were closed by the military government or under
its supervision.” They added that only “the vigilance of the military
government’s representatives largely prevented more serious lawlessness in
regard to land seizure.” In other words, it was that government that prevented
the Arabs from returning to their lands.
The report’s authors also objected to a decision made by Pinhas Lavon, a
senior Mapai figure who opposed the military government and who replaced
Ben-Gurion as defence minister in early 1954 (but resigned a year later during
the so-called Lavon affair, which involved a covert operation in Egypt that
went wrong). Lavon cancelled the prior decision to divide Galilee into 46
separate, closed areas in which Arabs needed a permit to move from one to
another. A division into three or four zones would be enough, to his mind, and
would ease life for Arab citizens. The committee members were adamantly against
this, arguing that it had led to excessively free movement by the Arabs,
because of which “the takeover of the state’s lands increased.”
The Ratner Committee exceeded the official mandate it received upon its
appointment in late 1955. Its secret codicil also includes detailed
recommendations for amending property laws, particularly an Ottoman statute
from 1858. The latter stipulated that anyone, Jew or Arab, who resided on land
for 10 years consecutively was entitled to retain it permanently. Now, eight years
after Israel’s founding, the committee was worried that within two years, much
land would be lost and transferred to Arab citizens. Its recommendation, then,
was to abolish the time frame in regard to remaining on these lands.
The text of the secret codicil shows unequivocally that a major task of
the military government was to act as a means to control the state’s lands
until their permanent status could be regularised and until, with state
support, Jewish settlement could begin in formerly Arab areas. Hence, one of
the committee’s conclusions:
“Until the stabilisation of security settlement in
the few reserve areas that can still be settled, it is essential to maintain
the military government in these places and to strengthen its apparatus… so
that the military government can ensure, directly and indirectly, that the
lands are not lost to the state.”
The panel described the military government as a tool in the struggle
against Arab “trespassers,” and added that without the military government,
“many more areas are liable to be lost to the state.” In a reprimand to the
state, the committee noted that the military government was suffering from
“known laxness… as a result of the criticism being levelled at it.”
Published in part at the time (without the secret section), the Ratner
Committee’s recommendations provoked considerable public and governmental
criticism. Ben-Gurion, who received a copy of the report in February 1956,
blocked discussion of it for months because of disagreements within the
government. The Sinai War, which erupted in October 1956, meant that it stayed
off the agenda for an even longer period. Ultimately, the report was never
submitted to the government for approval, but nevertheless served as the basis
for policy in the coming years. In 1958, another committee, headed by Justice
Minister Pinhas Rosen, suggested far-reaching changes in the military
government, effectively proposing its almost total abolition. Not surprisingly,
the cabinet held lengthy discussions in 1959 about whether to publish the
recommendations of the Rosen committee.
Why did the state continue to conceal a report that was written more
than six decades ago? The explanation might lie in a cabinet session in July
1959, in which Education Minister Zalman Aranne stated that “among the
conclusions are some that are political.” In other words, security had nothing
to do with it. He added, “The thing must be done, but not revealed, such as
Judaizing Galilee, for example.”
Perhaps it’s appropriate here to recall the words of Yehiel Horev, the
former director of the Malmab, who admitted in an interview to Haaretz last
July that the defense establishment is simply trying to hamper historians.
“When the state imposes confidentiality, the published work is weakened… If
someone writes that the horse is black, if the horse isn’t outside the barn,
you can’t prove that it’s really black.”
Adam Raz, a historian, is a researcher at the Akevot Institute for
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research and author of the book “Kafr Qasem
Massacre: A Political Biography,” published in both Hebrew and Arabic.
The Jewish National Fund is trying to evict the Sumarins from the
home they have lived in for 30 years - if Annexation
goes ahead then thousands of Palestinian homes in the West Bank will be
declared ‘abandoned’
The
1950 Absentee Property Law
[APL] was the main legal instrument used by Israel to steal the land belonging to the
three-quarters of a million Palestinians who were expelled from Israel as well
as thousands of Palestinian who continued to live in Israel.
The
Custodian
of Absentee Property [CAP] took charge of this land and over 2 million
dunams, were given to the Jewish National Fund, a para-state body whose
constitution specifies that land it controls is for the sole benefit of Jews.
The JNF was incorporated in Israel by the 1953 JNF Status Law.
The
criteria for transferring land to the CAP was that its owner was residing in an
‘enemy’ country, i.e. the surrounding Arab countries that the refugees had fled
to. The APL was to last as long as a State of Emergency lasted in Israel. In
fact a State of Emergency has lasted continuously since 1948, not because there
is an emergency but because ‘security’ in Israel is a good pretext for
confiscating Arab land.
What
was particularly outrageous about the APL was that even Palestinians who had
fled for safety to a neighbouring village a mile away in 1948 found that they
were declared Present-Absentees, a truly Orwellian term. They were both Present
and Absent, thus enabling the ‘socialist’ Kibbutzim to take over the lands they
had always coveted from their Arab neighbours.
Of course the provisions of the Absentee
Property Law have NEVER been applied to Jews because Israel is a Jewish state
and Jewish Settlement is enshrined in the Jewish Nation State Law.
In
1967 with the conquest of East Jerusalem [EJ] and the West Bank, Israel annexed
EJ and applied Israeli law to it, including the APL. Virtually all property in EJ
therefore fell under the CAP because the owners and residents were living after
15 May 1948 in what was an ‘enemy country’, Jordan yet now the property was located in Israel.
Because
an application of the APL to all the Arab residents would have meant,
effectively, a new expulsion of Palestinians, the Knesset in 1970 passed the
‘Law and Administration Procedures Law’ to exempt those living in
Jerusalem.However it didn’t apply to
residents of the West Bank who had property in EJ.
Likewise
residents of EJ who owned property in West Jerusalem which had always been part
of Israel were still considered Absentees in respect of that property. However
Israelis who owned property in EJ which they had been forced to abandon would now
be able claim that property.Here we see
how the law clearly operates in a racist manner.
Shortly
after the 1967 War, in government meetings of 22 November 1968 and 3 February
1969, a decision was taken not to apply the APL to EJ except in the case of
empty property. The assumption being that, unlike 1948, when the Palestinians
were forced out, the situation in EJ was different and there were no prospects
of ‘encouraging’ the original inhabitants to leave.Jerusalem was too much in the public eye for
there to be mass expulsions.
However
from 1977 onwards a new decision of the Israeli government enabled the seizure
of almost all property that complied with the broader definition of “absentee
property”. This decision had very severe consequences for EJ Palestinians. During
the 1980s, an accelerated process of settler take-over of properties began.
In
1992, the application of the APL by the CAP to facilitate settlement expansion
in EJ was revealed in a report concluded by the Klugman Committee [KC] (‘the
Klugman Report’) [KR]. The KC identified 68 properties in EJ that were
transferred, with the assistance of the State of Israel, from Palestinians to
Jewish organisations. The KR strongly criticised the CAO’s actions, including
its transfer of the absentee property to settler organisations.
However
in 1997, the limitations on exercising the APL were further reduced and in June
2004, the Ministerial Committee for Jerusalem Affairs decided to revive the use
of the APL in the manner observed between 1977 and 1992.
This
was despite the then-Attorney General, ‘Meni’ Mazuz, sending a strongly-worded
letter to Netanyahu, who was the Minister responsible for the office of the
CAP) ordering the immediate cessation of the application of the APL to EJ
property belonging to residents of the West Bank. Mazuz ordered the Government
to return to the policy that preceded the ministerial decision, namely not to
use its powers regarding those properties except in special circumstances and
subject to the approval of the Attorney General. However this remained a dead
letter.
On
15 April 2015, the Supreme Court ruled affirming the applicability of the APL to
properties in EJ belonging to Palestinians living in the West Bank and
approving all past expropriations that were carried out under the Law. However while
approving the overall application of the Law to EJ properties owned by West
Bank Palestinians, the Supreme Court established important criteria regarding
the implementation of the Law in EJ. The Court held that as a general rule, the
Law shall be implemented to EJ properties owned by West Bank Palestinians only
in very rare and extreme cases (some of the judges could not even imagine that
such cases exist).
The Sumarin family
Today
in EJ, applications to the CAP are an integral part of the process of
transferring most rights in property. Applications to the CAP can be made at
the stage of ownership transfer or even before. The Recorder of Deeds asks the
buyer to apply to the CAP and get a certificate from him stating that the
property is not an absentee property.
[The
information above comes from a Legal
Memo prepared for the Norwegian Refugee Council of February 2017].
The Sumarin Family
In
1989 the JNF applied to the Custodian for Absentee Property to have the Sumarin
family home declared absentee property. This was despite members of the family
having lived in the house continuously for 30 years. The Custodian deemed it
abandoned without the family’s knowledge.
The
eviction attempts have been spearheaded by Himanuta, a subsidiary of the Jewish
National Fund (KKL-JNF) which declares itself as a real estate agency. Their
purpose is to hand the property to Jewish settlers. The property was
transferred to KKL-JNF along with a host of other Palestinian properties in
Silwan.
Following
taking over the ownership of the Sumarin home, the KKL-JNF filed an eviction
suit against the Sumarin family in 1991. The lawsuit was dismissed but KKL-JNF
appealed and continued the proceedings repeatedly for nearly 30 years.
Jerusalem District Court
On
June 29th, 2020 the family lost an appeal in the Jerusalem District Court,
which gave the green light for their eviction. The family, with support from an
international network of activist, crowdfunded to submit an appeal to the
Supreme Court. The court’s declaration that it will hear the appeal temporarily
delays the eviction.
Blockade of JNF headquarters in Jerusalem
An
international campaign, led by the Sumarin family and including Jewish Israeli
groups, has developed to prevent the eviction. In the UK, human rights
campaigners have spoken out prominently against the eviction. A cross-party
group 69 MPs has signed Early Day Motion 529, which condemned the eviction. In
Jerusalem, on the day of the court decision, activists from “Free Jerusalem”
and “All That’s Left” chained themselves to the entrance of the JNF-KKL
headquarters: nine protesters were arrested.
Zionist
Colonialism is Alive and Thriving in 2020
What
these actions show is that neither Zionism nor Zionist Colonialism is dead.
Many liberal Zionists imagined that with the achievement of statehood in 1948
that the Zionist architecture of the Israeli State could be dismantled. It is
arguable, at least from a Zionist point of view, that the JNF had to be
established in order to provide land for the Zionist colonists before the
establishment of statehood.
But
what possible pretext could there be for the continuation of the existence of
the JNF beyond 1948 unless the continuation of colonisation was envisaged?Not only that but after the expulsion of the
Palestinian refugees the Israeli state either handed outright or sold very
cheaply over 2 million dunums of land (each dunum is a ¼ of an acre) to the
JNF.
The
reason of course for the continuation of the JNF and the Jewish Agency was that
the Israeli government and these Zionist institutions were intent on the
‘ingathering of the exiles’. Jewish immigration at the expense of the native
Palestinians. That was why Israeli Arabs were put under military law from
1948-1966.It was not because there was
any serious concern about a fifth column but because this was necessary to keep
the Arabs off the land, which was kept empty until the new Jewish immigrants arrived.
This
was in other words nothing less than a piece of racial engineering carried out
under the guise of security.
How
Israel’sTheft of Land from the
Palestinians in Israel works
The
establishment in law of the JNF in 1953, a law which wrote the JNF’s Memorandum
of Association (constitution), could only have one meaning. The Israeli state
wanted to continue with a policy of ethnic cleansing but in such a way that its
hands were not seen to be dirty.
Signing the Covenant between the JNF and the Government - pledging to steal as much Palestinian land as possible
In
addition to the JNF having the special status of a private institution with
public powers under the 1952 and 1953 World Zionist Organisation – Jewish
Agency (Status) and Jewish National Fund Laws, in 1960-1961 there were passed a
whole series of laws whereby Israel’s land regime was regularised with the
passage of the Basic Law: Israel Lands, the Israel Land Law and the Israel
Lands Administration Law. In 1961 a Covenant was signed
between theIsraeli government and the JNF. The purpose of this exercise
was to end duplication between government and JNF.
An
Israeli Land Council was formed with 22 members – 12 from the ILA and 10 from
the JNF. The Israel Land Administration was renamed
the Israel Land Authority (ILA) in 2009.
Up
to 1948 the JNF had bought 600,000 dunums of land. From thereon the JNF ended
up with 2.5 million dunums. There is no evidence that the JNF paid a single
shekel for what was stolen property. This constituted 13% of total Israeli
land. The other 80% is in the hands of the ILA.
This
puts to bed the lie that the JNF’s ‘Jewish land’ was bought with the pennies of
Jews in the diaspora. In fact 80% of its land was a stolen gift.
In response to a petition
from Adalah in 2004 the JNF claimed that
‘Equality
does not mean giving someone the right to live on someone else's land since,
just as the Jews do not have the right to live on Islamic Waqf land, or land
belonging to one of the churches, non-Jews do not have the right to choose land
given to the Jews for the sake of achieving their right to equality.”
Except
that this was Palestinian not ‘Jewish’ land to begin with. The Christian church
and the Moslem Waqf don’t own 13% of Israeli land and control another 80%.
Nor do they
have leases stipulating that Jews cannot rent or lease their lands.
Israel is
unique in capitalist societies in that 93% of its land is owned or controlled
by the State. Why is there such a tiny market in private land in Israel? Is
Netanyahu a secret socialist? Clearly not.
The answer
is because under a free market, Arabs would inevitably penetrate the deepest
Jewish settlements. Sooner or later most communities would become mixed. In
order to prevent this there are 2 options - one the present system of state
control or, as in South Africa, specific legislation confining racial or
national groups to specific areas.
Instead of,
as in South Africa, the equivalent of the Natives Land Act of
1913 and the Group
Areas Act of 1950 (1957, 1966) Israel decided that segregation would be
enforced by the State sub-contracting out the task to a para-state, nominally
non-State body, the Jewish National Fund, in coordination with the Israel Lands
Authority/ Administration.
As former
Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon joked,
only in Cuba and North Korea does the State control a greater percentage of the
land. Assuming that that is true, then the reason in those states has nothing
to do with ensuring the ethnic division of the land.
How the Settler Right See It
Israel
Hayom, the largest newspaper in Israel, a free sheet funded by Sheldon Adelson described
the plight of the Sumarin family somewhat differently.
After a
30-year legal battle, a Jerusalem court has ruled that the Sumarin family must
vacate a property located in EJ and return it to its rightful owners. The
family has been supported by some 30 left-wing organizations with many funded
by the European Union.
Nachi
Eyal, one of the directors at Himanuta, the real estate company at the heart of
the attempt to steal the property of the Sumarin family, applauded the
Jerusalem District Court's decision.
Eyal
said ‘I will work with all of my might so
that the property will be turned over to its rightful owners.’ Orwell may
be dead but 1984 lives on. But according to these people, all Palestinian land
is alienated from its ‘rightful owners’
and it is only a matter of time until it is restored.
Below
is a piece by someone who visited the Sumarin family, something no right-wing
Israeli paper would of course bother to do.
In 2018, I visited
the Sumarin family in their EJ home, right by the walls of the historical Old
City. Welcoming me with sweet tea and biscuits, Ahmad Sumarin told me about
their decades-long fight in the Israeli courts to keep their home. Like other
Palestinian families in the Silwan neighbourhood, the Sumarins are in danger of
being evicted to make way for Israeli colonisers.
Now, two years
later, the family faces one last, urgent battle. On 30 June, the Israeli court
will hear the family’s final appeal. “There
are six children in this household,” Ahmad explained to me. If the family
loses in court, the children will all become homeless.
Why are they being
made homeless?
The Sumarins built
their home in the 1950s and have lived there for generations. But the Jewish National Fund (JNF),
an Israeli NGO and substantial landowner, has been attempting to steal the
house for decades,
using a dubious Israeli law. Through its subsidiary Himanuta,
the JNF intends to hand the house over to Israeli colonisers, amid the Israeli
government’s ongoing attempt to ethnically cleanse EJ of Palestinians.
The Campaign
So far, 69 MPs
have signed an Early
Day Motion (EDM), condemning the JNF’s attempts to evict the Sumarin
family. It is noticeable that 37 SNP MPs, virtually their entire contingent has
signed the EDM compared to just 21 Labour MPs and 5 Liberal Democrats. The EDM
states that:
[The House] reiterates that ethnic
cleansing is one of the most serious crimes, and that the UK is committed to
upholding international law; urgently requests the Government to intervene on
behalf of the Sumarin family, and calls on the Charity Commission to review the
charitable status of JNF UK.
Jewish people
already made an official
complaint to the Fundraising Regulator about JNF in the UK, arguing
that it funds activities in contravention of international humanitarian laws.
JUDAISATION
Jewish-Israeli
anthropologist and activist Jeff Halper, who founded the Israeli
Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) explained that the case
of the Sumarin family is yet another expression of a key element of Israel’s
colonial policy towards the Palestinians and their lands that gets scant
attention: the policy that Israel itself called ‘Judaization’.
The term
‘Judaization’ has been used extensively by Israeli ministers
and academics,
as well as Israel’s mainstream
press, to describe the process of changing the demographics of an
area, depopulating its Palestinian Arab and Bedouin communities and settling
Jewish people. According to Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, EJ is
now “home to at least 370,000
Palestinians and some 209,000 Israeli settlers [colonisers]”.
Hundreds of
Silwan’s Palestinian residents face
eviction to make way for colonisers. The Israeli state has forced others to demolish their own homes.
Standing on the roof of the Sumarin home, it’s haunting to see the colonisers’
flags flying from the rooftops of homes that have been stolen.
Wardeh Sumarin
explained that:
There are so
many [Palestinian] families with this same problem. Every year [the JNF and
Himanuta] take more houses, [using] the same law in every house. Israel’s law
protects them and lets them take any house they want.
‘We may just save the Sumarin family’
Dick Pitt of
campaign group Stop the JNF told The
Canary that there is still hope. He stated:
Five days after
George Floyd was killed, an unarmed autistic Palestinian, Iyad Halak, was
killed by Israeli police as he lay wounded on the floor. For decades the
Israeli state has illegally taken Palestinian land, whether on a small scale
such as attempts to evict the Sumarin family, or bigger, with the proposed
annexation of the Jordan Valley into Israel. Just as the violence and racism of
the US police has continued until it is meeting resistance, so Israeli violence
and racism will continue until the world says this is unacceptable.
Right now the
issues of human rights, opposition to illegal occupation, opposition to ethnic
cleansing and basic human compassion line up to say this eviction is
wrong. If enough of us act now with petitions, letters, [and] pressure on
MPs to sign Early Day Motion 529, we may just save the Sumarin family from
unjust eviction.
Contact your MP
ICAHD’s Halper
stated:
Using in this case the Jewish National
Fund, a quasi-governmental corporation with charitable status in the UK, Israel
is expending time, resources and political capital on removing one family on
doubtful legal and moral grounds. If this is allowed to happen, if the UK
government continues to grant the JNF charitable status, if the Jewish
community and other ‘pro-Israel’ voices continue to support policies of
Judaization and displacement, then they are all complicit. We of the Israeli
Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) call on the British government to
protect the Sumarin family and revoke the political JNF’s charitable status.
After decades
of fighting to keep their home, the Sumarin family needs everyone with a
conscience to take action. “People
outside can put pressure on the JNF so that it can’t occupy all the houses it
wants,” Ahmad Sumarin told me.
You can contact
your local MP, informing them of the plight of the Sumarins and
asking them to sign the Early
Day Motion. You can also ask MPs to contact the Foreign Office and
the Israeli embassy to pressure Israel to stop the eviction. This is the last
chance for the Sumarin family.
The Canary asked the JNF to comment on the Sumarin case, but received
no reply.
Court rules that the Sumreen family may stay in its East Jerusalem
house until the case it settled. JNF, backed by settler group Elad, argues that
it owns the building
Ha’aretz15.12.19. Hagar Shezaf
An Israeli court ruled this week that a Palestinian
family may stay in its home in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan until
a final ruling on the Jewish National Fund’s demand to evacuate it is made.
The Sumreen family case is the latest case that
left-wing groups are holding up as evidence of a growing cooperation between
the JNF and settler organizations in Jerusalem and the West Bank.
After a 30-year legal battle, the JNF in September was
granted ownership of the family’s home by the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court,
but the family appealed the ruling and asked to remain in the house until the
case is settled.
Jerusalem District Court Judge Chana Miriam Lomp rejected the JNF’s claim that the Sumreens
shouldn’t be allowed to stay and its argument that the family's appeal is
unlikely to be accepted. However, Lomp demanded that the family present a
30,000-shekel ($8,6000) guarantee.
The
JNF, backed by settler group Elad, claims that one of the family’s
ancestors was an “absentee,” i.e., a civilian who lived in an enemy country, as
a result of which his property was confiscated by the state – which then
sold it to the JNF. Magistrate Court Judge Miriam Kaslassy accepted in
September the JNF’s claim of ownership on this basis.
In response, the JNF said that
"KKL-JNF
acts and will continue to act in a professional manner in regard to its
property, and insists on its lawful rights over lands that it owns, just as the
court rouled, regardless of race, gender or religion."
After the family of 18 appealed to the Jerusalem
District Court to prevent their evacuation before a final ruling is reached,
the JNF, stressing it operates “in a
professional and unbiased manner,” claimed the family has other properties
in the city, and therefore would not be harmed by the evacuation of their Silwan
home.
The first suit seeking the family’s eviction was filed
by JNF subsidiary Himnuta in 1991. It was based solely on the determination
that the father of the family, Musa Sumreen, was an absentee, and the family
won.
The family then filed its own suit, seeking to be
declared the property’s owner. But that suit was rejected in 1999 because the
family failed to prove it had purchased the property.
Meanwhile, the state determined that Sumreen’s
children were also absentees, prompting Himnuta to file a new suit in 2005.
Himnuta won that suit, but in 2011 the verdict was vacated on the grounds that
family members hadn’t been aware of the legal proceedings against them. The
most recent suit was filed in 2017.
Left-wing critics have recently been attacking the
JNF, claiming that it has turned into an operational unit of settler
organizations. Several months ago, a Palestinian family living on ground owned
by the JNF near Bethlehem was evacuated following a request by the
organization.
Several days afterward, a settler outpost was set up
in the same spot. The JNF says it is only acting to protect its property.
Last month the Sumarins lost a 30-year legal battle waged by
the JNF, which was secretly sold their home in the late 1980s by the Israeli
state.
The family’s property was seized – in violation of
international law – under a draconian 1950 piece of legislation declaring
Palestinian refugees of the Nakba “absent”, so that they could not reclaim
their land inside the new state of Israel.
The Israeli courts have decreed that the APL can be applied
outside Israel’s recognized territory too, in occupied Jerusalem. In the
Sumarins’ case, it appears not to matter that the family was never actually
“absent”. The JNF is permitted to evict the 18 family members next month. To
add insult to injury, they will have to pay damages to the JNF.
A former US board member, Seth Morrison, resigned in protest
in 2011 at the JNF’s role in such evictions, accusing it of working with
extreme settler groups. Last year the JNF ousted a family in similar
circumstances near Bethlehem. Days later settlers moved on to the land.
Ir Amim, an Israeli human rights group focusing on
Jerusalem, warned that these cases create a dangerous legal precedent if
Israel carries out its promise to annex West Bank territory. It could rapidly
expand the number of Palestinians classified as “absentees”.
But the JNF never lost its love of the humble tree as the
most effective – and veiled – tool of ethnic cleansing. And it is once again
using forests as a weapon against the fifth of Israel’s population who are
Palestinian, survivors of the Nakba.
Earlier this year it unveiled its “Relocation Israel 2040” project. The plan is intended to
“bring about an in-depth demographic change of an entire country” – what was
once sinisterly called “Judaization”. The aim is to attract 1.5 million Jews to
Israel, especially to the Negev, over the next 20 years.
As in Israel’s first years, forests will be vital to
success. The JNF is preparing to plant trees on an area of 40 sq km belonging to Bedouin
communities that survived earlier expulsions. Under the cover of
environmentalism, many thousands of Bedouin could be deemed “trespassers”.
The Bedouin have been in legal dispute with the Israeli
state for decades over ownership of their lands. This month in an interview
with the Jerusalem Post newspaper, Daniel Atar, the JNF’s global head, urged
Jews once again to drop money into its boxes. He warned that
Jews could be dissuaded from coming to the Negev by its reputation for “agricultural crimes” – coded reference
to Bedouin who have tried to hold on to their pastoral way of life.
Trees promise both to turn the semi-arid region greener and
to clear “unsightly” Bedouin off
their ancestral lands. Using the JNF’s original colonial language of “making the desert bloom”, Atar said his
organization would make “the wilderness
flourish”.
The Bedouin understand the fate likely to befall them. In a
protest last month they carried banners: “No
expulsions, no displacement.”
After all,
Palestinians have suffered forced displacement at the JNF’s hands for more than
a century, while watching it win plaudits from around the world for its work in
improving the “environment”
The JNF used to symbolize the hope for planting and
rebuilding. Now it is acting as a proxy for settler groups bent on evicting a
family of 18 from their home in the EJ neighborhood of Silwan
(this is
untrue – the JNF was always a colonising agency which sought the transfer of
the Palestinians – TG)
The
Sumreen family pose for a photo in their East Jerusalem home, March 23, 2018.Credit: Olivier Fitoussi
I moved to Jerusalem more than 35 years ago. I walk to
my office most days, and my route often takes me past the outskirts of the EJ
neighborhood of Silwan. It is there that a drama as sad as it is superfluous,
as cruel as it is crazy, has been playing out for three decades. It is one case
among many, and as I mark the holiday of Hanukkah in peace and security, it is
on my mind.
The Sumreen family lives in Silwan. Since 1991 they
have been involved in a legal struggle with the Jewish National Fund,
backed by the settler group Elad and various other agencies committed to
consolidating the Jewish presence in Palestinian neighborhoods of Jerusalem.
These groups have been trying to have the Sumreens evicted by arguing that some
members of the family were “absentees” – that is, civilians who lived in an
enemy country – as a result of which their property was confiscated by the state,
which then sold it to the JNF.
This claim is centered on an aggressive and
controversial interpretation of the Absentees’ Property Law of 1950. After many
twists and turns, a Jerusalem court ruled in September that not only must the
family leave, but that they must also pay considerable damages. As the court
battle continues, earlier this month, a judge decided the family could stay in
the house while they appeal the ruling.
While the JNF says it is only trying to protect its
property, it is acting as a proxy for settler groups in this and similar cases.
Months ago, a Palestinian family living on ground owned by the JNF near
Bethlehem was evacuated following a request by the organization: several days
later, a settler outpost was set up in the same spot. The
practical effect of the JNF’s campaign against the Sumreens is that this family
of 18, guilty of no crime and accused of no wrongdoing, may soon find itself
without a home, bereft and bankrupt.
Such an outcome would be profoundly unjust, even if it
were the result of a lengthy judicial process. It is not like the crimes of
violence and vandalism which seem increasingly to plague our world – people
gunned down, tires slashed and homes defaced. In this case, everything plays
out in slow motion, and there are piles of paperwork and precedents. But as I
celebrate the freedom and independence symbolized by Hanukkah, this
displacement sickens me. Justice is not served. Insisting on the payment of
damages adds insult to injury.
One of Israel’s most remarkable poets is Almog Bahar.
In a 2010 poem he refers to a protest in which he participated in another
flashpoint EJ neighborhood, Sheikh Jarrah. As the court-sanctioned removal of the
Sumreens from their home looms, a verse comes to mind:
And
one night I dreamt: We’ll come to Sheikh Jarrah for a protest, regiment by regiment of the expelled, and with us will march the Yemenites
expelled from the Kineret village, the Jewish Hebron refugees of 1929, the
Arabs of Ba’ka, Talbieh, Katamon, Meah Sha’arim, Lifta and Ein Karem expelled
during the Nakba, the Jewish quarter refugees expelled in '48 by Jordan, and in
'67 their homes were nationalized by the government of Israel to be sold for
great profit leaving them refugees, the Palestinians expelled from the villages
surrounding Latrun in '67, the Mizrahim expelled from the Yemin Moshe
neighborhood after years in the eye of the target, to make room for painters
and artists, the residents of unrecognized Bedouin villages in the Negev, the
mortgage defaulters expelled from their homes by eviction crews, the Jaffa and
Musrara residents forced to vacate their homes to make way for the
rich, and the people of Silwan, a demolition order threatening their homes.
All of us are divided only by chance from the
experience of displacement. A generation or two ago, and possibly again in the
space of a few generations, we or the ones we love have experienced or will
experience the sting of eviction. My parents did, and I pray my children will
not. The awareness of the proximity of this cruel fate to our own lives should
spur us to empathize, and then to mobilize. Must the Sumreen family be added to
the long list of the displaced? Can a solution not be found that preserves
legality and dignity, elementary fairness and due process?
In the 20th century, the Jewish National Fund
symbolized the hope for planting and rebuilding. Let’s hope that as the day of
the Sumreens’ eviction approaches, the leaders of the JNF remember that trees,
and homes, and families, should be planted. Not uprooted.
Rabbi Michael Marmur Chairs the Board of Rabbis for
Human Rights.
Director,
Settlement Watch project: Israeli Peace Now movement
11/17/2011 06:31 pm ET Updated Dec 06, 2017
August 2nd, 2009. The Ghawi
and Hannun families of Sheikh Jarrah in EJ are waking to the sounds of police and
trucks and movers. In a few hours, their houses will have become the home to
settler families, and they will be kicked out to the street.
Those images are flashing back to me as I think of
what could happen in two weeks in Silwan.
We’ve seen those pictures in the past: Palestinian family out, Israeli settlers
in. Sometimes the house is legally bought by the settlers; sometimes it is the
implementation of the “right of return” to properties that belonged to Jews
before 1948 (like in the case of Ghawi and Hannun); and sometimes it is because
the Israeli Authorities decided to use the Absentee
Property Law in order to take over the Palestinian house and give it to the
settlers.
The Sumarin family has been living for decades at the
entrance to the Wadi Hilweh
neighborhood of Silwan, not far from Al-Aqsa Mosque. Two months ago, the court
scheduled their eviction for November 28, 2011 in a ruling handed down in the
absence of defense by the Sumarins. Their house is considered by the
authorities as a property of an absentee, and therefore, it was transferred to
the hands of the Himanuta company which requested the eviction.
In Silwan there is a fight over
nationality, history and also religion. For the Palestinians, it is a
Palestinian neighborhood, next to Al-Aqsa Mosque where thousands of
Palestinians have been living for ages. The settlers are trying to make it into
“The City of David,” using archaeology
and tourism to change the public domain in Silwan. The visitors center of
the “City of David” tourism site was built by the settlers next to the house of
the Sumarin family. If taken by the settlers, the Sumarin house would give them
a large contiguous area at the very entrance to Silwan and dramatically change
the character of the neighborhood.
For the last 20 years the Jewish National Fund has
been acting to transfer Palestinian property in EJ to the settlers. Tens of
dunams of land and homes housing dozens of Palestinians in Silwan were
evacuated by the JNF through various legal proceedings and transferred to
settlers. In many cases the JNF does this through its subsidiary Himnuta, whose
shares are held by the JNF.
The barter deal in Silwan: absentee land turns
into JNF land in order to give it to settlers
In the 1980s and early 1990s, dozens of properties in
Silwan were declared absentee properties and sold to the Development Authority.
According to the law, the Development Authority and the Israel Land
Administration are required to administer their assets equally without
discrimination based on nationality. Conversely, the JNF and Himnuta operate
according to a JNF memo that provides that its assets be leased or transferred
to the possession of Jews only. In order to bypass the requirement of equality,
the authorities in the early 1990s used the JNF and Himnuta to transfer
property in Silwan to the settlers.
On May 23, 1991, a barter deal was signed between the
Development Authority and Himnuta, according to which the Development Authority
was to transfer 30 dunams of absentee property in Silwan to Himnuta in exchange
for land it owns in the Wadi Ara area. The purpose of the deal, as defined by
the director of the land Department in the JNF and Himnuta, was “for those properties to be under Jewish
ownership.” Later, some of the properties were leased to the Elad settler
organization without a tender.
Most of the properties were inhabited by Palestinian
families that did not even know that their homes were declared absentee
property, sold in a barter deal to Himnuta and leased to settlers. Himnuta
began demanding the Palestinian tenants be evicted from their homes through
legal actions. Among the properties transferred in this way to Elad are Beit
Hamaayan (“the well house”), which serves as a tourist and archaeological
excavation site, and Beit Hatzofeh (“the lookout house”), which serves the
organization as part of its tourist site and visitors center as well as serving
as a settler residence.
“The Klugman Report” — The machine was stopped,
but never killed
Following the election of the Rabin Government in
1992, a special investigation committee, “the Klugman Committee,” was assigned
to investigate the conduct of the authorities with regards to EJ properties
that were given to the settlers. The committee described how the Ministry of
Housing (under Ariel Sharon as a Minister) facilitated and funded the transfer
of Palestinian properties in the Old City and Silwan into the hands of settler
organizations. One of the methods to take over properties was the use of the
Absentee Property Law. Among the Committee’s key findings were:
·Properties had been systematically allocated based on criteria that
violated the principles of equality, and contrary to rudimentary procedures.
·The settler organizations located the properties they were subsequently
to receive from the State, based on affidavits which they themselves arranged
and confirmed.
·The CAP failed to exercise even minimal discretion.
·No tenders had been issued, and it was the political echelon of the
Ministry of Housing that instructed which organization would receive which
asset.
Following the Klugman Report, the machine that was
established in order to assist the settlement at the heart of Palestinian
neighborhoods in EJ was stopped. However, some of the procedures that started
at the early ‘90s, continued. To this day, Himnuta continues pursuing legal
claims against Palestinian residents based on the barter deal from 1991. At
least three families in Silwan are at risk of eviction after years of long and
expensive legal proceedings that have not yet ended. The Sumarin family is one
of them.
As a Jew, I feel ashamed that Himnuta and the JNF,
which are claiming to act in the name of the Jewish people, are continuing to
use their organization in order to kick out Palestinian families from their
homes, and to bring in Jewish families instead. This is not only politically
wrong and dangerous, but also immoral.
The eviction can still be stopped: Himnuta can decide,
instead of giving the property to settlers, to give it to the Palestinian
family that has lived in it for years. The Israel Police can decide not to
assist in the eviction of the family and to prevent it. The police have avoided
evicting settlers from Beit Yehonatan in Silwan for more than three years, even
though the court has repeatedly ordered to evict them. The attorney general has
asserted on different occasions that if the police believe there is a threat to
public security it must prevent right holders from realizing their rights at
that time.
The only question is whether the authorities will have
the political wisdom to prevent the upcoming provocation in Silwan.
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