Benjamin Netanyahu Proposes to ‘Swap’ Israel’s Arab citizens in exchange for the West Bank Settlements

The Expulsion of Israel’s Palestinians is a Consensus Policy of Likud and Israeli Labour

Making its way through the Knesset is the Jewish State Bill, which removes the status of Arabic as an official language.  The Jewish State Bill also defines Israel as a state of the Jewish people.  By Jewish people is meant not just Jews who live in Israel but all Jews, including Jews in the diaspora.

Israel is quite unique in that it doesn’t have a single nationality covering all its citizens or residents.  In most countries citizenship and nationality are interchangeable, even when people define themselves as members of different nations.  One’s legal nationality is often different from the nation someone belongs to as in the case of multi-national states.

For example all British citizens are also British nationals even though the latter may consider themselves English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish.  Citizenship usually defines one’s political rights and sits on top of a shared nationality.

Israel's fascist Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the far-Right Yisrael Beitenu

There is no Israeli nationality.  There is a Jewish nationality, a Muslim, Christian and many other nationalities but in a Jewish state only one nationality counts.  Israel’s Arab citizens are considered by most Jews to be there on sufferance. They are viewed as a fifth column.  When e.g. there were wild fires in Israel over the summer, as has occurred in many countries, Israel's Arab citizens were immediately blamed by Minister of Public Security Gilad Erdan and Netanyahu.  When the fires had died down those Israeli Arabs who had been arrested were released but the memories of the 'fire intifada' remained.  Arabs in Israel are the scapegoat for all perceived ills in Israel much as Jews used to be the scapegoat in European countries. [see Two months on, still no evidence of a 'fire intifada' in Israel]  Israel's Arabs are the enemy within.  A plurality of Israeli Jews have consistently supported the physical expulsion of Israel’s Palestinian citizens.  See e.g. Nearly half of Israeli Jews believe in ethnic cleansing, survey finds.

That is the meaning of a Jewish state.  It isn’t a state in the same sense that Britain is a Christian state. In Britain, the fact that I am Jewish has no bearing on my rights and responsibilities. There is no Christian National Fund that tells me that as a Jew I cannot reside or live in a certain area.  In Israel there is a Jewish National Fund, which controls or owns 93% of Israeli land.  Non-Jews cannot live on such land which is why there is such overcrowding in the Arab sector.  When the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the Israeli Land Authority and JNF could not refuse to lease or sell land to an Arab the Knesset passed a Reception Committee Bill which allowed all-Jewish communities to reject Arab applications to join those communities.  In South Africa that was called Apartheid.

The Israeli Right led by Avigdor Lieberman of Yisrael Beitenu, Israel’s fascist Defence Minister, has long advocated as part of a 2 state solution that Israel’s Palestinian citizens should be transferred into a Palestinian state (for which read Bantustan).  This is  another reason why a 2 State solution is an Apartheid solution.  A 2 state solution would be an open invitation to Israel to expel Israel’s Arabs.  Israel’s definition of itself as a Jewish state rests on how high the percentage of Jews in Israel is.  The higher the percentage of Jews the more secure and safe the Jewish state is.

Tzipi Livni, co-leader of the Zionist Union with the Israeli Labour Party, supports the transfer of Israel's Arab citizens

As the tide of corruption accusations begin to threaten Netanyahu’s ability to hold onto power, it is no surprise that he now supports the idea of a physical expulsion of Israel’s Palestinians.  No one should be under any illusions though that this is simply a product of Israel’s far-Right government.  Under the previous Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, negotiations conducted by the then Foreign Minister, Tsipi Livni, aimed at transferring Israel’s Palestinians into a Palestinian state.  Livni is now a co-leader of the Zionist Union, the electoral grouping that includes the Israeli Labour Party.  Israeli Labour is an ardent supporter of segregation between Jew and Arab, i.e. an Apartheid policy.

This is why Israel as a Jewish state is an inherently racist state.  It is not Jewish culturally or even religiously.  The defines its Jewishness based on a racial definition of who is Jewish.

Tony Greenstein

Umm el-Fahm

Netanyahu alarms Umm al-Fahm with talk of population swap

3 August 2017

After al-Aqsa attack, Israeli PM backs controversial transfer plan of far-right defence minister, Avigdor Lieberman

Middle East Eye – 4 August 2017

Israel’s crackdown on access to the al-Aqsa mosque compound after two Israeli policemen were killed there last month provoked an eruption of fury among Palestinians in occupied Jerusalem and rocked Israel’s relations with the Arab world.

Netanyahu and Lieberman agree on the ethnic cleansing of Israel's Arabs

Three weeks on, the metal detectors and security cameras have gone and – for now, at least – Jerusalem is calmer.

But the shockwaves are still reverberating, and being felt most keenly far away in northern Israel, in the town of Umm al-Fahm. The three young men who carried out the shootings were from the town’s large Jabareen clan. They were killed on the spot by police.

Umm al-Fahm, one of the largest communities for Israel’s 1.7 million Palestinian citizens, a fifth of the population, had already gained a reputation among the Jewish majority for political and religious extremism and anti-Israel sentiment.

In large part, that reflected its status as  home to the northern branch of the Islamic Movement, led by Sheikh Raed Salah. In late 2015, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu outlawed the Movement as a terror organisation, despite his intelligence agencies failing to find evidence to support such a conclusion.

More likely, Netanyahu’s antipathy towards Salah’s group, and Umm al-Fahm, derives from its trenchant efforts to ensure the strongest possible presence of Muslims at al-Aqsa.

As Israel imposed ever tighter restrictions on Palestinians from the occupied territories reaching the mosque, Salah organised regular coaches to bring residents to the compound from Umm al-Fahm and surrounding communities.

Umm el-Fahm - Israel's largest Arab city

Thousands attend funeral

Nonetheless, the three youths’ attack at al-Aqsa last month has served to bolster suspicions that Umm al-Fahm is a hotbed of radicalism and potential terrorism.

That impression was reinforced last week when the Israeli authorities, at judicial insistence, belatedly handed over the three bodies for burial.

Although Israel wanted the funerals as low-key as possible, thousands attended the burials. Moshe Arens, a former minister from Netanyahu’s Likud party, expressed a common sentiment this week: “The gunmen evidently had the support of many in Umm al-Fahm, and others seem prepared to follow in their footsteps.”

Yousef Jabareen, a member of the Israeli parliament who is himself from Umm al-Fahm, said such accusations were unfair.

“People in the town were angry that the bodies had been kept from burial in violation of Muslim custom for two weeks,” he told Middle East Eye. “There are just a few extended families here, so many people wanted to show solidarity with their relatives, even though they reject the use of violence in our struggle for our civil rights.”

Nonetheless, the backlash from Netanyahu was not long in coming.

In a leak to Israeli TV, his office said he had proposed to the Trump administration ridding Israel of a region known as the Little Triangle, which includes some 300,000 Palestinians citizens. Umm al-Fahm is its main city.

The Triangle is a thin sliver of Israeli territory, densely packed with Palestinian citizens, bordering the north-west corner of the West Bank.

As part of a future peace deal, Netanyahu reportedly told the Americans during a meeting in late June, Umm al-Fahm and its neighbouring communities would be transferred to a future Palestinian state.

‘A double crime’

In effect, Netanyahu was making public his adoption of the long-standing and highly controversial plan of his far-right defence minister, Avigdor Lieberman.

This would see borders redrawn to allow Israel to annex coveted settlements in the West Bank in exchange for stripping hundreds of thousands of Palestinians of their Israeli citizenship and reassigning their communities to a highly circumscribed Palestinian state.

Jamal Zahalka, another member of the parliament, from Kafr Kara in the Triangle, said Netanyahu was supporting a double crime.

“He wins twice over,” he told Middle East Eye. “He gets to annex the illegal settlements to Israel, while he also gets rid of Arab citizens he believes are a threat to his demographic majority.”

Lieberman lost no time in congratulating Netanyahu for adopting his idea, tweeting: “Mr Prime Minister, welcome to the club.”

With his leak, Netanyahu has given official backing to an aspiration that appears to be secretly harboured by many Israeli politicians – and one that, behind the scenes, they have been pushing increasingly hard with Washington and the leadership of the Palestinian Authority.

A poll last year showed that nearly half of Israeli Jews want Palestinians expelled from Israel.

With Netanyahu now publicly on board, it looks suspiciously like Lieberman’s role over many years has been to bring into the mainstream a policy the liberal Haaretz newspaper has compared to “ethnic cleansing”.

Marzuq al-Halabi, a Palestinian-Israeli analyst and researcher at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, believed the move was designed with two aims in mind.

It left a “constant threat” of expulsion hanging over the heads of the minority as a way to crush political activity and demands for reform, he wrote on the Hebrew website Local Call. And at the same time it cast Palestinian citizens out into a “territorial and governmental emptiness”.

Inevitably, the plan revives fears among Palestinian citizens of the Nakba, the Arabic word for “Catastrophe”: the mass expulsions that occurred during the 1948 war to create Israel on the ruins of the Palestinian homeland.

Jabareen observed that the population swap implied that Palestinian citizens “are part of the enemy. … It says we don’t belong in our homeland, that our future is elsewhere.”

Backing from Kissinger

The idea of a populated land exchange was first formalised by Lieberman in 2004, when he unveiled what he grandly called a “Separation of the Nations” programme. It quickly won supporters in the US, including from elder statesman Henry Kissinger.

The idea of a land and population swap – sometimes termed “static transfer” – was alluded to by former prime ministers, including Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon, at around the same time.

But only Lieberman set out a clear plan. He suggested stripping as many as 300,000 Palestinians in the Triangle of their Israeli citizenship. Other Palestinian citizens would be expected to make a “loyalty oath” to Israel as a “Jewish Zionist state”, or face expulsion to a Palestinian state. The aim was to achieve two states that were as “ethnically pure” as possible.

Jabareen noted that Lieberman’s populated land exchange falsely equated the status and fate of Palestinians who are legal citizens of Israel with Jewish settlers living in the West Bank in violation of international law.

Lieberman exposed his plan to a bigger audience in 2010, when he addressed the United Nations as foreign minister in the first of Netanyahu’s series of recent governments. Notably, at that time, the prime minister’s advisers distanced him from the proposal.

Mass arrests

A month after Lieberman’s speech, it emerged that Israeli security services had carried out secret exercises based on his scenario. They practised quelling civil disturbances with mass arrests following a peace deal that required redrawing the borders to expel large numbers of Palestinian citizens.

Behind the scenes, other Israeli officials are known to have supported more limited populated land swaps.

Documents leaked in 2011 revealed that three years earlier the centrist government of Ehud Olmert had advanced just such a population exchange during peace talks.

Tzipi Livni, then the foreign minister, had proposed moving the border so that several villages in Israel would end up in a future Palestinian state. Notably, however, Umm al-Fahm and other large communities nearby were not mentioned.

The political sympathies between Lieberman and Livni, the latter widely seen as a peacemaker by the international community, were nonetheless evident.

In late 2007, as Israel prepared for the Annapolis peace conference, Livni described a future Palestinian state as “the answer” for Israel’s Palestinian citizens. She said it was illegitimate for them to seek political reforms aimed at ending Israel’s status as a “home unto the Jewish people”.

Demographic reduction

The first hints that Netanyahu might have adopted Lieberman’s plan came in early 2014 when the Maariv newspaper reported that a population exchange that included the Triangle had been proposed in talks with the US administration, then headed by Barack Obama.

The hope, according to the paper, was that the transfer would reduce the proportion of Palestinian citizens from a fifth of the population to 12 per cent, shoring up the state’s Jewishness.

Now Netanyahu has effectively confirmed that large-scale populated land swaps may become a new condition for any future peace agreement with the Palestinians, observed Jabareen.

At Lieberman’s request in 2014, the Israeli foreign ministry produced a document outlining ways a land and population exchange could be portrayed as in accordance with international law. Most experts regarded the document’s arguments as specious.

The foreign ministry concluded that the only hope of justifying the measure would be to show either that the affected citizens supported the move, or that it had the backing of the Palestinian Authority, currently headed by Mahmoud Abbas.

Anything short of this would be a non-starter because it would either qualify as “forced transfer” of the Triangle’s inhabitants, a war crime, or render them stateless.

The problem for Israel is that opinion polls have repeatedly shown that no more than a quarter of Palestinians in the Triangle area back being moved into a Palestinian state. Getting their approval is likely to prove formidably difficult.

Zahalka rejected claims by Israeli politicians that this was a vote of confidence from Palestinian citizens in Israeli democracy.

“Israel has made the West Bank a living hell for Palestinians, and few [in Israel] would choose to inflict such suffering on their own families. But it also because we do not want to be severed from the rest of the Palestinian community in Israel – from our personal, social and economic life.”

Jabareen agreed. “We are also connected to places like Nazareth, Haifa, Acre, Jaffa, Lid and Ramle.”

And he noted that Netanyahu and Lieberman were talking about redrawing the borders to put only their homes inside a future Palestinian state. “Umm al-Fahm had six times as much land before Israel confiscated it. We still consider those lands as ours, but they are not included in the plan.”

Recognise Jewish state

It is in this context – one where Palestinians citizens will not consent to their communities being moved outside Israel’s borders – that parallel political moves by Netanyahu should be understood, said Jabareen.

Not least, it helps to explain why Netanyahu has made recognition of Israel as a Jewish state by Abbas’ Palestinian Authority a precondition for talks.

Aware of the trap being laid for it, the PA has so far refused to offer such recognition. But if it can be arm-twisted into agreement, Netanyahu will be in a much stronger position. He can then impose draconian measures on Palestinians in Israel, including loyalty oaths and an end to their demands for political reform – under threat that, if they refuse, they will be moved to a Palestinian state.

At the same time, Netanyahu has been pushing ahead with a new basic law that would define Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people, rather than of Israel’s entire population. The legislation’s intent is to further weaken the Palestinian minority’s claim on citizenship.

Netanyahu’s decision to ban the Islamic Movement as a terror organisation fits into the picture too.

In a 2012 report by the International Crisis Group, a Washington and Brussels-based conflict resolution group, an official in Lieberman’s party explained that one of the covert goals of Lieberman’s plan was to rid Israel of “the heartland of the Islamic Movement”.

Conversely, Netanyahu’s Likud allies and coalition partners have been pushing aggressively to annex settlements in the West Bank.

Zahalka noted that the prime minister gave his backing last week to legislation that would expand Jerusalem’s municipal borders to incorporate a number of large settlements – a move that would amount to annexation in all but name.

“The deal is Israel takes Jerusalem and its surrounding areas, and gives Umm al-Fahm and its surroundings to the PA,” he said.

The pieces seem to be slowly falling into place for a populated land exchange that would strip hundreds of thousands of Palestinians of their Israeli citizenship.

Paradoxically, however, the ultimate obstacle may prove to be Netanyahu himself – and his reluctance to concede any kind of meaningful state to the Palestinians.

Jonathan Cook is a Nazareth- based journalist and winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism

Netanyahu Offers Swapping Israeli Arab Communities With Settlements in Future Deal With Palestinians

PM raises idea of land swap in talks with senior Trump adviser Kushner and envoy Greenblatt, sources say. White House officials: One of many ideas discussed

Barak Ravid and Jack Khoury Jul 27, 2017 10:36 PM

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has suggested to American officials that Israeli-Arab communities could be moved under Palestinian control as part of a final status agreement, Israeli officials said on Thursday. In exchange, Israel would annex some West Bank settlements.

Netanyahu's idea for land swaps in the Wadi Ara region in return for Israeli settlements was reported for the first time on Thursday on Channel 2 News.

The officials, who requested anonymity, said Netanyahu raised the idea in the talks with U.S. President Donald Trump's senior advisor Jared Kushner and American envoy Jason Greenblatt, during their visit in Israel a few weeks ago.

"The issue didn't come up as a separate proposal, but as part of a proposal for a comprehensive arrangement with the Palestinians," one official said.

Senior White House officials said the issue was broached in the talks, but not in a serious or significant way. "This may have been one of many ideas discussed several weeks ago in the context of a peace agreement and not in the context of a separate annexation," an official said.

The report came a day after a mass funeral in Umm al-Fahm, an Arab city in Israel's Wadi Ara, of the three assailants who carried out the attack at the Temple Mount, in which two policemen were killed.

Calls for carrying out further attacks heard during the funeral evoked more criticism in the right wing against Netanyahu's decision to remove the contested metal detectors from the entrances to the Temple Mount. Israel had installed the security measure at the holy site following the attack.

The report also comes amid a wave of announcements and statements from the Prime Minister's Office in the last few days in a bid to appease rightist public opinion. Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who has been advocating for several years to hand over Wadi Ara to the Palestinians in a future peace agreement, tweeted on Thursday night: "Mr. prime minister, welcome to the club."

MK Aida Touma-Suliman responded on Thursday to the report about Netanyahu's proposal. "The cat is out of the bag and Netanyahu has shown his true colors regarding the Arab population," she said. "Lieberman's plan has been adopted by the prime minister," she said.

"The Ara residents are not only Israeli citizens, they're also indigenous people who dwell on their land, and are not to be compared with settlers dwelling on another nation's land. We the Arab citizens aren't part of any such equation and aren't willing to pay the price again for Israel's policy of occupation and settlements."

See also Expelling Israel's Arab population? Al Jazeera 

Israel is jettisoning even the trappings of democracy

Apologists for the Israeli state always refer to the fact that Arabs have the vote in Israel, as if  putting your cross on the ballot paper once every 4 years rectifies all the racist injustices of the previous years.  In fact nearly 50% of Israeli Palestinians don’t even vote because it is considered a waste of time.  But those who do vote overwhelmingly for Arab parties (& the Communist Hadash) not under one electoral roof – the Joint List.

The reason the Arab parties and Hadash joined together for the first time ever was because the electoral threshhold was raised from 2% to 3 .25% in order to exclude Arab parties from the Knesset altogether.  That was the brainwave of the fascist former Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.  That forced all the non-Zionist parties to come together.

Now the Knesset has decided to support a Bill that will allow the Jewish majority to expel or suspend Arab MKs.  In an ethnocracy, where different communities vote for either Jewish or Arab parties, then this means quite simply that the Jewish parties are deciding which Arab representatives will be allowed.

Democratic?  In Israeli terms yes, by most peoples’ standards no.

Excluding Arabs from Israel’s ‘democracy’

An article by Marzouq El-Halabi in +972 follows the one from Times of Israel

MKs Basel Ghattas, Haneen Zoabi and Jamal Zakalka, from the Joint Arab List’s Balad faction, visited the families of Palestinians killed while trying to stab Israeli soldiers. The MKs were trying to negotiate the returns of their corpses to the families. For this the Knesset ethics committee decided they should be suspended. Photo by Noam Moskowitz.

Controversial MK suspension bill passes first Knesset reading

Proposal would allow lawmakers to ban colleagues for inciting racism, supporting terror; critics say move limits democracy

By Raoul Wootliff, Times of Israel

March 28, 2016

The Knesset voted on Monday night [March 28] to advance a controversial law enabling MKs to suspend their colleagues, approving the first reading of the bill by 59 to 52 votes.

The proposal would allow 90 MKs to vote to suspend lawmakers if they “negate the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state,” incite racism, or express support for a terror group or state in its war against Israel.

The coalition managed to secure the win despite two Likud members refusing to support the measure, after the opposition Yisrael Beitenu party abstained from the vote.

The measure must still pass two more Knesset readings.

The vote was preceded by a flurry of speeches by MKs calling to support or oppose the measure, as well as discussions by some MKs about a soldier charged with murder over the shooting death of a wounded Palestinian assailant in Hebron last week.

Speaking before the vote, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the bill would help in Israel’s fight against terror.

“I expect all those who say they are in favour of the bill to vote in support and to not give an advantage or profit to those who support terror,” he told the weekly Likud meeting, anticipating rebellion by a number of coalition MKs.

Likud MKs David Amsalem and Avraham Neguise followed through on threats not to vote with the government until it renews the immigration of remaining Falashmura Jews from Ethiopia.

Earlier on Monday, Avigdor Liberman, head of hawkish Yisrael Beytenu, said he would not support the measure unless he gets tit-for-tat backing from the coalition for a bill to block the Supreme Court from involvement in activities of the Central Elections Committee.

Backed by Netanyahu, the bill was proposed after three Arab MKs made a condolence visit to the families of Palestinians killed while attacking Israelis, and the three observed a moment of silence, which some said was tantamount to showing support for terror.

In a legal opinion published hours before a Monday night vote on the bill, Eyal Yinon, the chief legal adviser for Israel’s parliament, said that while he does not deem it necessary, it is “preferable” the proposal receive a majority and could face legal challenges if it doesn’t.

"If MKs suspected of committing crimes, they should go to the Attorney General, not misuse parliament." President Rivlin

The controversial measure has been vociferously opposed by some, including President Reuven Rivlin, who warned that the power to punish lawmakers should not be in the hands of fellow Knesset members.

Earlier this month Rivlin said the bill reflected “a problematic understanding of parliamentary democracy,” and that the correct address for MKs who had committed or were suspected of committing crimes was the attorney general, not fellow lawmakers.

Writing on Twitter during the vote, opposition leader Isaac Herzog railed against the proposal, saying it would do nothing to prevent terror attacks.

“I call on the prime minister and his coalition: Stop!” he wrote. “This is an unnecessary and twisted law that is not needed in order to fight terror.”

In February, a stormy meeting of the Knesset’s Constitution Law and Justice Committee voted to send the MK suspension bill for a first reading in the Knesset — prompting the head of the Joint (Arab) List MK Ayman Odeh to announce that he and members of his party were considering resigning from the Knesset if the three lawmakers who made the condolence visit were expelled.

The three lawmakers were suspended on February 8 by the Knesset Ethics Committee — Hanin Zoabi and Basel Ghattas for four months, and Jamal Zahalka for two.

Odeh also said a bill such as the one under discussion could strengthen a nascent debate in Arab Israeli intellectual circles about creating a separate Arab parliament in Israel, which would act as a counterweight to a Knesset that only represented the country’s Jews.

Ahead of the vote, former Shin Bet head and current Likud MK Avi Dichter said Odeh would be called to account for his support of Palestinian terrorists assassinated by Israeli forces.

Odeh later took the podium and accused Dichter of “cheap and lowly incitement” to get headlines.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.

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On our way out of the apartheid closet

By advancing legislation to exclude the Arab minority from the Knesset, Israel is showing the world that its political system is really only intended for one group.

By Marzouq El-Halabi, +972
April 08, 2016

The so-called “suspension bill,” which passed its first reading in the Knesset several weeks ago, constitutes another step by the Israeli Right to exclude Arab representatives from Israeli politics. The bill, which gives the Knesset the authority to temporarily or permanently suspend elected members, stems not from a worry over the fate of Israel’s democracy, but is part of the Right’s slow effort to maliciously and intentionally harm it. The ultimate goal of the bill goes unspoken, although it is clear to all: to remove the Arab electorate from the political game in order to ensure the Right’s reign in the near future.

That strategy began even before the right-wing parties marked Arabs in Israel as the targets of a well-orchestrated delegitimization campaign. There is not a single leader on the Right who has not tried his hand, whether through incitement, anti-democratic bills — some of which passed — or targeting specific Arab MKs in the Knesset. A racist public discourse that besmirches the Arab minority as a “suspicious group” that is always “at fault.” My presumption is that this incitement is organized, even if it comes from different political parties.

From cooperation to exclusion

After the Right failed, at least temporarily, to exclude the Arabs by raising the election threshold, it attempted to put pressure on the Arab minority and its representatives. Unfortunately, many media outlets cooperated with the Right’s mission, even so far as strengthening the attacks against the Arab minority and its representatives. When the atmosphere grew tense due to violent attacks by individual Palestinians, the Right struck again, this time by outlawing the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement. The Islamic Movement may have been the target, but the goal was to create an atmosphere in which the entire Arab public is removed from the political sphere. Now it seems that the Right has marked the representatives of the nationalist Balad party, and any other Arab representative that does not dance to the tune of Bennett or Netanyahu.

A Palestinian citizen of Israel votes in the 2015 elections, March 17, 2015 Ramle, Israel. Photo by Oren Ziv/Activestills.org

The process is clear. The point is to drive a wedge between the Arab minority as a significant electorate power and the opposing right-wing camp. Let us remember that it was the Arab members of Knesset who provided a political safety net for Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the 90s. This kind of scenario could repeat itself, which is exactly what the Right is trying to prevent by removing the Arab minority from the political game.

The establishment’s attitude since the founding of the state has been to include the Arab minority in the political game, and to encourage Arab citizens to participate in elections. Those who held this view believed that the participation of the Palestinians who remained in their homeland would give the nascent state a seal of approval, and would only strengthen its legitimacy in the eyes of the world. The legal attitude was much the same: aside from the “Al-Ard ruling” in the 1960s, Israel’s Supreme Court has tended to allow Arab parties who had been disqualified by the Central Elections Committee from participating in elections. The Right, which has failed at disqualifying Arab parties and leaders, is attempting to pass legislation that would allow it to do so.

And if they succeed? What then?

This move is not surprising since those behind it are right-wing ideologues who prefer the nation and religion over the state. What is surprising is the political camp that positions itself as an alternative to right-wing rule, the one which praises itself for protecting democracy. Instead of fighting for democracy and proper representative for Arabs, this camp turns a cold shoulder to them. This camp seems to enjoy taking part in the delegitimization of the Arab minority in Israel (see MK Avi Dichter’s speech targeting Joint List Chairman Ayman Odeh*). This kind of discourse leaves little room for doubt that even the “enlightened” camp, which “fights for democracy” does not intend to include Arabs in its democracy.

Let’s imagine that Arabs are finally excluded from the Knesset, and that the number of Arab citizens who vote starts to dwindle — whether due to more anti-democratic legislation or as a response to the Right’s policies. That is precisely when the world will start to suspect that the regime in Israel is an apartheid regime that has come out of the closet. If the political game between the river and the sea becomes designated for one nation alone, the result will be that the Right in Israel will have succeeded in turning Israel into an apartheid state. There is no other name for this kind of rule. The problem is that we are already at the peak of this process.

Marzouq El-Halabi is an attorney, journalist, and author. He writes a regular column in the London-based Al-Hayat daily newspaper.

* The link provided in the text  [here] was actually to the March 1st Haaretz report of an attack by Odeh on former Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter. A few weeks later ‘Former Shin Bet chief MK Avi Dichter (Likud) accused the Joint (Arab) List leader MK Ayman Odeh on Monday of doing nothing to stop terror against Israelis.’ Times of Israel, March 29, 2016

'The Only Democracy in the Middle East' Suspends Arab MK Haneen Zoabi

Israel’s mask of democracy slips as Haneen Zoabi is suspended for 6 months

Haneen Zoabi -  singled out for abuse by Israeli right and Zionists

 In the summer Haneen Zoabi, a member of the Knesset for Balad, was asked of the kidnapping and murder of 3 teenage settlers was an act of terrorism.  She replied that it wasn’t.  There was no reason to believe that it was part of a wider political or military campaign as opposed to the act of individual Palestinians.  For this she has been suspended for 6 months from the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament.

Ayelet Shaked MK of Jewish Home, a far-right member of the government coalition also wrote, on Face Book, that Palestinian mothers should be murdered in order to prevent the birth of Palestinian ‘snakes’.  A clear call for genocide.  Her punishment?  There wasn’t any.

The government has also passed an Act to raise the threshold that a Party needs to be elected, to 3.25%, the purpose of which is to prevent the election of Arab MKs.

Israel used to parade itself as the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’.  Now even that sounds hollow, as Zoabi, who supported and was on board the Mavi Marmara, has outraged the Zionist public in Israel.  With the exception of the Meretz civil rights group, all the Zionist parties, including the Labour Party, voted to support, by 64-16 the motion to suspend Zoabi.

Below is a full report from Jonathan Cook’s excellent blog.

Israel moves to outlaw Palestinian political parties in the Knesset

5 November 2014

Electronic Intifada – 4 November 2014

The Israeli parliament voted overwhelmingly last week to suspend Haneen Zoabi, a legislator representing the state’s large Palestinian minority, for six months as a campaign to silence political dissent intensified.

The Israeli parliament, or Knesset, voted by 68 to 16 to endorse a decision in late July by its ethics committee to bar Zoabi from the chamber for what it termed “incitement.”

It is the longest suspension in the Knesset’s history and the maximum punishment allowed under Israeli law.

At a press conference, Zoabi denounced her treatment as “political persecution.”

“By distancing me from the Knesset, basically they’re saying they don’t want Arabs, and only want ‘good Arabs.’ We won’t be ‘good Arabs,’” she said.

The Knesset’s confirmation of Zoabi’s suspension comes as she faces a criminal trial for incitement in a separate case and as the Knesset considers stripping her of citizenship.

But Zoabi is not the only Palestinian representative in the firing line. Earlier this year the Knesset raised the threshold for election to the parliament, in what has been widely interpreted as an attempt to exclude all three small parties representing the Palestinian minority. One in five citizens of Israel belong to the minority.

In addition, it emerged last week that a bill is being prepared to outlaw the northern branch of the Islamic Movement, the only extra-parliamentary party widely supported by Palestinian citizens.

Along with Zoabi, the Islamic Movement’s leader, Sheikh Raed Salah, has been among the most vocal critics of Israeli policies, especially over the al-Aqsa mosque compound in occupied Jerusalem.

Death threats

Zoabi was originally suspended after legislators from all the main parties expressed outrage at a series of comments from her criticizing both the build-up to Israel’s summer assault on Gaza, dubbed “Operation Protective Edge,” and the 51-day attack itself, which left more than 2,100 Palestinians dead, most of them civilians.

In particular, fellow members of Knesset were incensed by a radio interview in which she expressed her disapproval of the kidnapping of three Israeli youths in the occupied West Bank, but refused to denounce those behind it as “terrorists.” The youths were later found murdered.

Zoabi faced a wave of death threats and needed to be assigned a bodyguard for public appearances.

During the Knesset debate on her appeal against the suspension, Zoabi said: “Yes, I crossed the lines of consensus — a warlike, aggressive, racist, populist, chauvinist, arrogant consensus. I must cross those lines. I am no Zionist, and that is within my legal right.”

Zoabi, who has come to personify an unofficial political opposition in the Knesset against all the main parties, is under attack on several fronts.

Last week she was informed that the state prosecution service had approved a police recommendation to put her on trial for criminal incitement for “humiliating” two policemen.

She is alleged to have referred to the policemen, who are members of the Palestinian minority, as “collaborators” as she addressed parents of children swept up in mass arrests following protests against the Israeli assault on Gaza over the summer.

Faina Kirschenbaum, the deputy interior minister in the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, has also drafted two bills directly targeting Zoabi.

The first would strip someone of the right to stand for the Knesset if they are found to have supported “an act of terrorism,” while the second would strip them of their citizenship.

Because ministers are not allowed to initiate private bills, the task of bringing the measures to the floor of the parliament has been taken up by the Knesset’s Law, Constitution and Justice Committee.

Intentional subversions

Zoabi further infuriated fellow members of Knesset this month when she compared the Israeli army to the Islamic State, the jihadist group that has violently taken over large parts of Syria and Iraq and has become notorious for kidnapping westerners and beheading them.

In an apparently intentional subversion of Netanyahu’s recent comparison of the Islamic State and Hamas, the Palestinian resistance movement, Zoabi described an Israeli Air Force pilot as “no less a terrorist than a person who takes a knife and commits a beheading.” She added that “both are armies of murderers, they have no boundaries and no red lines.”

Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, was among those who responded by calling Zoabi a “terrorist.”

“The law must be used to put the terrorist — there is no other word for it — the terrorist Haneen Zoabi in jail for many years,” he told Israel Radio.

A poll this month found that 85 percent of the Israeli Jewish public wanted Zoabi removed from the Knesset.

“There is a great deal of frustration among Israeli politicians and the public at their army’s failure to defeat the Palestinian resistance in Gaza,” said Awad Abdel Fattah, the secretary general of Balad, a political party representing Palestinians in Israel. “At times like this, the atmosphere of repression intensifies domestically.”

Silencing all political dissent

The initiatives against Zoabi are the most visible aspects of a wider campaign to silence all political dissent from the Palestinian minority.

Last week, Lieberman instructed one of his members of Knesset, Alex Miller, to initiate a bill that would outlaw Salah’s Islamic Movement.

The legislation appears to be designed to hold Netanyahu to his word from late May. Then, the Israeli media revealed that the prime minister had created a ministerial team to consider ways to ban the movement.

At the same time, the Israeli security services claimed that Salah’s faction was cooperating closely with Hamas in Jerusalem.

After Israel barred the Palestinian Authority from having any presence in Jerusalem more than a decade ago and expelled Hamas legislators from the city, Salah has become the face of Palestinian political activism in Jerusalem.

Under the campaign slogan “al-Aqsa is in danger,” he has taken a leading role in warning that Israel is incrementally taking control of the most sensitive holy site in the conflict.

Last month it emerged that the Knesset is to vote on legislation to give Jewish religious extremists greater access to the mosque compound. Already large numbers of Jews, many of them settlers, regularly venture on to esplanade backed by armed Israeli police.

They include Jewish extremists that expressly want to blow up the al-Aqsa mosque so that a replica of a Jewish temple from 2,000 years ago can be built in its place.

Last week, Yehuda Glick, a leader of one of these extremist groups, was shot and wounded in Jerusalem. In response, Israel shut down al-Aqsa for the first time since the outbreak of the second intifada fourteen years ago. Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority, called it a “declaration of war.”

According to the text of Lieberman’s bill, the northern wing of the Islamic Movement “subverts the State of Israel’s sovereignty while making cynical use of the institutions and fundamental values of the Jewish and democratic state.”

It also blames the movement for “an eruption of violence and unrest among the Arab minority in Israel, while maintaining close relations with the terrorist organization Hamas.”

Raising the threshold

The attacks on Zoabi and the Islamic Movement come in the wake of legislation in March to raise the electoral threshold — from 2 percent to 3.25 percent — for a party to win representation in the Knesset.

The new threshold is widely seen as having been set to exclude the three Palestinian parties currently in the Knesset from representation. The minority’s vote is split almost evenly between three political streams.

Zoabi’s Balad party emphasizes the need for the Palestinian minority to build its own national institutions, especially in education and culture, to withstand the efforts of Israel’s Zionist institutions to strip Palestinian citizens of their rights and erase their identity. Its chief demand has been for “a state for all its citizens” — equal rights for Jewish and Palestinian citizens.

Balad’s chief rival is the joint Jewish-Arab party of Hadash, whose Communist ideology puts a premium on a shared program of action between Jewish and Arab citizens. However, its Jewish supporters have shrunk to a tiny proportion of the party. It too campaigns for equal rights.

And the final party, Raam-Taal, is a coalition led by prominent Islamic politicians.

The three parties have between them eleven seats in the 120-member Knesset, with one held by a Jewish member of Knesset, Dov Khenin, for Hadash.

Abdel Fattah said his Balad party had been urging the other parties to create a coalition in time for the next general election to overcome the new threshold.

So far it has faced opposition from Hadash, which is worried that an alliance with Balad would damage its image as a joint Jewish-Arab party. A source in Hadash told Israeli daily Haaretz in late September: “Hadash is not an Arab party, and there’s no reason it should unite with two Arab parties.”

Abdel Fattah said Hadash’s objections were unreasonable given that both Balad and the Islamic faction believed it was important to include Jewish candidates on a unified list. “Eventually they will have to come round to a joint list unless they want to commit political suicide,” he remarked.

Falling turnout

Balad has been under threat at previous general elections. The Central Elections Committee, a body representing the major political parties, has repeatedly voted to ban it from running. Each time the decision has been overturned on appeal to the Supreme Court.

In 2007 the party’s former chairman, Azmi Bishara, was accused of treason while travelling abroad and has been living in exile ever since.

But the representation of all the parties is now in danger from the raised threshold. Over the past thirty years, turnout among Palestinian citizens has dramatically fallen to little more than half of potential voters, as the minority has seen its political demands for equality greeted with a wave of laws entrenching discrimination.

Among the anti-democratic measures passed in recent years are laws that penalize organizations commemorating the Naqba, the Palestinians’ dispossession of their homeland in 1948; that provide a statutory basis to admissions committees, whose function is to prevent Palestinian citizens living on most of Israel’s territory; and that make it impossible for most Palestinian citizens to bring a Palestinian spouse to live with them in Israel.

Uncompromising stance

Last week, Balad MKs boycotted the opening ceremony of the Knesset, following the summer recess, in protest at Zoabi’s treatment.

At a press conference in the parliament, her colleague, Basel Ghattas, warned: “The day is approaching when Arab MKs will think there is no use participating in the political sphere. We are discovering more and more that we are personae non gratae at the Knesset.”

On Facebook, Lieberman responded that he hoped the Arab MKs would “carry out this ‘threat’ as soon as possible.”

The increasingly uncompromising stance towards all the Palestinian minority’s political factions marks a shift in policy, even for the right.

Although no Israeli government coalition has ever included a Palestinian party, and the Nasserist al-Ard movement was banned in the 1960s, Jewish politicians have generally viewed it as safer to keep the Palestinian parties inside the Knesset.

Analyst Uzi Baram observed in Haaretz that even Menachem Begin, a former hardline prime minister from Netanyahu’s Likud party, believed it would be unwise to raise the threshold to keep out Arab parties. If they were excluded, Baram wrote, it was feared “they would resort to non-parliamentary actions.”

‘Paving the way toward fascism’

Zoabi petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court against her suspension from the Knesset in early October. However, the judges suggested she first use an arcane appeal procedure before the Knesset’s full plenum to demonstrate she had exhausted all available channels for lifting the suspension.

Israeli legal scholars have noted the irregularities in the ethics committee’s decision to impose a record-long suspension on Zoabi. The committee’s task is to regulate parliament members’ behaviour inside the Knesset, not political speech outside it.

Aeyal Gross, a constitutional law professor at Tel Aviv University, warned that the Knesset’s treatment of Zoabi was “paving the way towards fascism and tyranny.”

Gross noted the extreme severity of the committee’s punishment of Zoabi, contrasting it with that of another MK, Aryeh Eldad. In 2008 he called for Ehud Olmert, the prime minister at the time, to be sentenced to death for suggesting that parts of the occupied territories become a Palestinian state.

Eldad was suspended for just one day, even though it was a clear example of incitement to violence in a country where a former prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was murdered by a right-wing extremist, citing similar justification for his actions.

Tyranny of the majority

The Supreme Court, which has shifted rightwards in recent years, may not be sympathetic to Zoabi’s appeal against her suspension.

In September the court jailed Said Nafaa, a former MK from her Balad party, for one year after he was convicted of visiting Syria in 2007 with a delegation of Druze clerics and meeting a Palestinian faction leader in Syria.

The crime of making contact with a foreign agent is the only one in Israeli law in which the defendant must prove their innocence.

The court may also be wary of making unpopular rulings at a time when it is under concerted attack from the Israeli right for being too liberal.

Ayelet Shaked, of the settler Jewish Home party, which is in the government coalition, has introduced a bill that would allow a simple majority of the Knesset to vote to override Supreme Court rulings.

Human rights lawyers warned that the bill would further erode already limited protections for minority rights.

Debbie Gild-Hayo, a lawyer with the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, warned that protections for minorities from the tyranny of the majority would be in severe jeopardy as a result. “These proposals wish to break down the checks and balances that are fundamental to democracy,” she said.

Zoabi remained defiant. She noted that, while she was being hounded, the legal authorities had ignored genocidal remarks made by Jewish politicians against Palestinians during the summer attack on Gaza.

“They’re putting me on trial over a trivial, meaningless matter, while ministers and MKs who incited to racism and incited to violence and even to murder aren’t being investigated, even after complaints were filed against them.”

She added: “If I am indicted, I’ll turn the hearings into the most political trial in Israel’s history.”

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