The Demolition of Um al Hiran in Israel’s Negev is why Israel is a racist, settler colonial state

2 Palestinian Israelis killed as Bedouin village is destroyed to make way for a Jewish town

No new Palestinian towns have been built since Israel's creation [Menahem Kahana/AFP]

There are those who naively believe that the illusory ‘two states’ will provide a solution to the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis.  That all that is required for peace is the achievement of  a Palestinian state.  Even were such a state possible, which it isn’t, then it would not address the racism that Israel’s 1.5 million Palestinians experience.

Even within Israel Israeli Palestinians are considered a ‘demographic threat.’  In blunt language, there are too many of them.  Israel is a Jewish state, not like the UK is a Christian state, where religion is a constitutional anachronism with no political meaning.  In Israel being Jewish means possessing privilege.  You get to live in better accommodation, you get paid more, you don’t suffer racial discrimination.  Um al Hiran was a village established in 1956 when the Bedouin were evicted from the south of the Negev.  They were placed here against their will.  Now today they have been violently evicted again by the bulldozers of the Jewish National Fund and the militarised police.   Two Palestinians have been murdered.  According to Al Jazeera, the driver of the car was met by a hail of bullets from the Israeli Police.

The lying statement of the Police said that:

"A vehicle driven by a terrorist from the Islamic Movement intended to strike a number of officers and carry out an attack," Micky Rosenfeld, police spokesperson, said in a statement.

However, Raed Abu al-Qiyan, an Um Al Hiran activist, denied that the driver of the car was seeking to harm police.

The man was a member of his Bedouin clan by the name of Yacoub Abu al-Qiyan.  Raed  told AFP news agency:  "The Israeli narrative is a lie. He was a revered school teacher.

"He was in his car and they shot at him from everywhere."  Al Jazeera’s report told how Israeli authorities regularly carry out demolitions of Bedouin homes they deem to have been built illegally.  However for Arabs in Israel, building permits are nearly impossible to obtain whereas Jewish Israelis are given preferential treatment.

Israel plans to demolish the whole of  Um Al Hiran and replace it with a Jewish village by the name of Hiran.

Um Al Hiran is just one of about 40 "unrecognised" Bedouin villages in Negev scheduled for demolition despite being home to tens of thousands of residents.

A Bedouin woman reacts during a protest against home demolitions on January 18, 2017 in the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran. MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP

Because of their "unrecognised" status, many of them are denied access to electricity, water and other municipal services.

Earlier in January, Palestinian citizens of Israel announced a nationwide strike after Israeli authorities demolished 11 Palestinian homes in the city of Qalansawe in central Israel.

These homes were also demolished on the pretext that they were built without a permit.

This is the naked racism of the ‘Jewish’ state.  During this demonstration the mild mannered head of the Joint Arab-Jewish list in the Knesset was treated no differently from anyone else.  He was hit twice by rubber bullets.

Those who support a ‘Jewish’ racist state in Israel, whether it is Jeremy Corbyn or the Jewish Labour Movement have a lot to answer for.  Israel is Jewish in the same way as South Africa was White or Nazi Germany was Aryan.  It is a badge of racial identification.

Tony Greenstein

Violence: the language of a Jewish state

18 January 2017

Here is another image (copyright: Keren Manor) that conveys the situation of Palestinians – these ones Palestinian citizens of Israel – more completely than any words. The man on the ground is Ayman Odeh, a member of the Israeli parliament, the head of the Joint List, the third largest party in the parliament, and the highest-ranking Palestinian politician in Israel.

Israeli police have just shot him with rubber-tipped bullets, not once but twice – including to the face. Odeh is one of the least confrontational politicians among Israel’s large Palestinian minority, a fifth of the population. His message is consistently one of peace and amity between all Israeli citizens, whether Jews or Palestinians. That does not seem to have protected him from the shoot-first, ask-questions-later approach of Israel’s security services towards Palestinians.

This image should be as shocking as seeing a bloodied Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn crawling in the dirt, watched impassively by US or UK police.

Um Al Hiran is home to several Palestinian Bedouin families [Menahem Kahana/AFP]

Context is important too. Odeh had joined the 1,000 inhabitants of Umm al-Hiran – all Palestinian citizens of Israel – early this morning in a demonstration to stop demolition crews destroying the 150 homes of their village in the Negev. Israel allowed these families to move to the area of Umm al-Hiran in the 1950s after it had driven them from their original, and much more substantial, lands during the Nakba. The pretext then for expelling them was that Israel needed their ancestral lands for an exclusively Jewish kibbutz.

That all occurred during a military government that ruled over Israel’s Palestinians for nearly two decades. More than 60 years later, exactly the same thing is happening again, but this time in front of the cameras. Umm al-Hiran is being destroyed so that an exclusively Jewish community, with the same name of Hiran, can be built over these families’ homes. Israel never issued Umm al-Hiran with a master plan, so now it can be declared illegal and its inhabitants called “squatters” and “trespassers”. The families are being ethnically cleansed a second time – not during hostilities or in a time of war, but by their own state in a time of peace.

They are far from alone. Thousands of other families, and their villages, face the same fate.

The truth is nothing has changed from the 1950s. Israel still behaves as if it is ruling militarily over its Palestinian citizens. It is still a Jewish state, one that privileges the rights of Jewish citizens over Palestinian “citizens”. It still treats all non-Jews as a threat, as an enemy.

Israel is not a normal kind of state. It is an ethnocracy, and one driven by an ideological variation of the ethnic nationalisms that tore apart Europe a century ago.

Odeh is a leader who campaigns for peace and equality between Jewish and Palestinian citizens. 

Today, he got his answer. His face is bruised, bloodied and bowed, crawling through the dirt. This is the language of a Jewish state.

 Jews, Make Your Voices Heard

The prime minister won't go quietly. Bulldozers are the ultimate refuge of the criminal suspect.

Odeh Bisharat Jan 18, 2017 8:37 PM

A Bedouin woman reacts during a protest against home demolitions on January 18, 2017 in the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran. MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP

In the eyes of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu all Arab citizens are terrorists, or, put euphemistically — they’re all a “demographic problem.” That’s been his theory forever, even when he was finance minister, and in light of the latest campaign by former senior security officials to keep Israel “Jewish and secure,” this legacy is not solely his.

Here are a few words about the demographic threat that “our forces” took care of on Wednesday in Umm al-Hiran. His name is Yakub Abu al-Kiyan, and he is a math teacher in Hura’s high school. His wife is Dr. Amal Abu Sa’ad, his brother Jabar is an Education Ministry inspector, and another brother Hamad is the principal of a school in Hura.

Koby, an activist in the Negev Coexistence Forum, reported on today’s encounter with this “threat.” He said that from the start police were aiming loaded weapons at people.

“I heard a few shots, and then I saw a white van start to move away from the policemen, not towards them,” he said. “After he started to move, he [the driver] was surely scared and tried to get away, the barrage of fire from the policemen started. They surrounded the truck, fired from all directions, some from in front and some from behind; at that point the driver was apparently wounded, lost control, continued down the hill, and that’s when the policemen were hurt. As far as I could tell, the driver was wounded and wasn’t in control of the vehicle.”

So this is the equal treatment referred to by Netanyahu, who conducts expulsions broadcast live, which will be remembered as the shame of the Jewish people for generations. This time it is impossible to declare, as in days of yore, that the Arabs are “rising up to destroy us,” or fled of their own free will.

Today all the authorities of the state of the Jewish people, from the government to the Supreme Court, are partners in a chilling action: Arabs out, Jews in. In dark times in history, the slogan was different, but the idea was the same: “Juden, raus” — Jews, out. I apologize for the free association working overtime on this insane day.

During the early years of the state, the Abu Al-Kiyan tribe was expelled from its lands in Hirbet Zubala, which they had cultivated for generations. After a period of wandering they were ordered in the 1950s by the military government to move to the Wadi Yatir area, where they established the village of Atir Umm al-Hiran. For the 60 years since, they’ve been fighting for recognition of their village, whose lands they occupied by government order.

But there is no shame. The government, with the backing of the Supreme Court, decided to expel the 1,000 residents, destroy the homes that were built with sweat and tears, and move the residents to a different village, which itself is overcrowded. Replacing them will be members of the chosen people.

The poet Mahmoud Darwish once wrote under similar circumstances, “Hooray for the conqueror of the village … Hooray for the tyrant who subdues the girl with eyes lined in blue.”

A few days ago Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel released his five-year plan as tidings for the Bedouin of the Negev. Attorney Sana Ibn-Bari managed to expose the plan’s intent to uproot unrecognized villages, so we now understand the plan’s true purpose. This is what the state is toward the Arabs; a state of bulldozers.

Writing in Haaretz last Friday, Yossi Verter predicted that Netanyahu wouldn’t go quietly. He will leave scorched earth behind, and the Arabs will be the first to feel his anger over the suspicions concerning his lust for power and love of luxury.

Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. Bulldozers are the ultimate refuge of the criminal suspect. It’s important for those Jews who refuse to be part of this spectacle to make their voices heard.

Uri Ariel MK of Far Right Jewish Home Condemns Treatment of Palestinians at Check Points

Hard-right minister says treatment of Palestinians shameful

It comes to a pretty pass when even Uri Ariel, of the Habayit HeYehudi (Jewish Home) Party condemns the treatment of Palestinians at Israeli checkpoints.  In all checkpoints in this Apartheid state there are two doors – one for Palestinians who wait for hours and another for Jewish settlers and Europeans.

Such is the nature of Israeli Apartheid and Zionism.

Tony Greenstein

Waiting to cross the Hawara checkpoint near Nablus, 2008.

Hard-right minister: Conditions at West Bank checkpoints ‘disgraceful’

Uri Ariel says Israel must improve Palestinian economy, build Gaza port: ‘We are responsible for the region’

By Times of Israel staff
April 15, 2016

The conditions suffered by Palestinians at Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank are “shameful and a disgrace to the State of Israel and to the security establishment,” Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel said on Friday.

Ariel [L], best known for his  fiery right-wing rhetoric  and his insistence on  Jewish rights to the Temple  Mount, told Tel Aviv Radio  on Friday morning that  Israel must take steps to improve the economic well-being of the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, including the long-disputed construction of a Gaza port.

Palestinians ‘stand there in terrible conditions: in the heat, in the rains. Why can’t we fix this?’

He said Palestinians should not be forced to pass checkpoints inside the West Bank and that conditions at checkpoints to Israel must be improved.

“Go and see how they stand and wait to enter Israel at the checkpoints. It’s shameful and a disgrace to the State of Israel and to the security establishment. People stand there in terrible conditions: in the summer heat, in the winter rains.” He added that workers often arrived before dawn and waited for hours without shade or water. “Why can’t we fix this?” he said.

Ariel said Gazans deserved a port for the import and export of goods and said this could be achieved with “one hundred percent security.” He called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop “considering” it and simply carry it out. “We’ve been considering for 47 years. They have no international ports. Why shouldn’t they have a port?”

He added that Israel should provide water and cooking gas to Palestinian towns, saying “We are responsible for the region.”

Ariel is a former settler leader who represents the Orthodox-nationalist Jewish Home party. He has repeatedly stated his wish to reinstate Jewish prayers at the Temple Mount. He visited the contested compound on several occasions including a visit this past September that was followed by days of Palestinian rioting, as tensions over the status of the site escalated.

Imagine if this were a synagogue

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Just imagine if this were a synagogue in say Iran (which has the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside Israel).  Dozens of security forces invade the place of worship, fire tear gas and stun grenades, injure a number of worshippers and cause much destruction.

What would be the reaction?  Many people would undoubtedly start drawing an analogy with Krystalnacht, the Nazi pogrom in Germany in November 1938.  People would undoubtedly cry 'anti-Semitism' and quite rightly so.  We would have Obama, Cameron and other hypocrites decrying this attack on the right to worship of peaceful Jews.  Yet what is the reaction to what Israel has done?  Nothing, except silence.

Of course none of this excuses the murderous Saudi regime, busy slaughtering fellow Muslims in Yemen and causing an utter human rights catastrophe there.  They are supposed to be the protectors of Muslim places of worship but in practice their only concern is how best to loot Arab oil wealth and keep their own population and migrant workers under the thumb.

Tony Greenstein

Israeli forces, right-wingers storm Aqsa Mosque compound

July 26, 2015 10:04 A.M. (Updated: July 27, 2015 5:42 P.M.) 

(MaanImages)

JERUSALEM (Ma'an) -- Israeli forces broke into Al-Aqsa Mosque compound Sunday morning firing stun grenades and rubber-coated steel bullets at Muslim worshipers as they cleared way for right-wing Jews who were visiting the compound to mark a Jewish fast day, witnesses said.

Uri Ariel MK from Jewish Home was allegedly one of the invaders

Dozens of Palestinian worshipers were reportedly hit with rubber-coated bullets and suffered excessive tear gas inhalation, while Israeli police officers were reported to have attacked worshipers with pepper spray, rods and rifle butts.

At least three Palestinians were reportedly detained.

The officers entered the compound through the Moroccan Gate, Chain Gate and Hutta Gate and clashed with worshipers, witnesses said, before Israeli soldiers then shut down the compound’s gates with chains.

Israeli soldiers also reportedly stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque itself and fired rubber-coated bullets inside the holy site. The compound's Palestinian security guards were assaulted and prevented from moving, witnesses said.

Israeli police claimed that they entered the mosque after "masked rioters" threw stones at them, "with the aim of preventing further injury to police."

Israeli media reported that four police officers were injured, with two moved to hospital for treatment.

As the clashes subsided, right-wing Jews began to make their way into the compound in groups via the Moroccan gate.

Israel's minister of agriculture, Uri Ariel, was reportedly among the right-wingers to tour the compound under heavy police escort. Ariel is a member of Naftali Bennett's ultra-right Jewish Home party.

(Islamic Endowment)

(MaanImages)

Israeli police said that a young Jewish man on Sunday attempted to enter while wearing phylacteries -- small leather boxes containing sacred texts worn by Orthodox men at prayer.

When told to remove them, the man resisted and grabbed hold of railings, biting a policeman who tried to remove him before he was arrested.

Sunday marked Tisha B'Av, an annual Jewish fast day that commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Jewish Temples. The fast day is considered the saddest day in the Jewish calendar.

Earlier in the morning, Israeli forces imposed strict restrictions on entry of Palestinians Muslim worshipers into the compound.

Witnesses said that at dawn, Israeli officers allowed only women and men over the age of 50 to enter the compound. After 6:30 a.m. all Palestinians were reportedly denied entry.

The Al-Aqsa Mosque compound has seen rising tensions in recent days, with Jewish organizations calling for the compound to be open to Jews for the week after Tisha B'Av and others seeking to celebrate unconfirmed reports that Israel is negotiating the reopening of the compound to non-Muslim worship.

At the end of June, International Crisis Group reported discussions between Israel and the Islamic Endowment that controls the mosque compound on allowing non-Muslim worship at the site, although the move has not yet been confirmed.

The third holiest site in Islam, the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound is also venerated as Judaism's most holy place as it sits where Jews believe the First and Second Temples once stood.

Following Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967, Israel has maintained an agreement with the Islamic Endowment not to allow non-Muslim prayer in the area.

Jewish prayer is allowed at the neighboring Western Wall, which is the last remnant of the Second Temple.

However, Israeli forces regularly escort Jewish visitors to Al-Aqsa, leading to anger among Muslim worshipers.

The last time Israeli police entered the mosque itself, in November last year, Jordan -- one of the very few Arab states with diplomatic relations with Israel -- recalled its ambassador.

AFP contributed to this report.

Israeli Arabs Singled Out For Dismissal and Attack in Israel

Oppression targets Palestinians in Israel

Israeli policemen arrest protesters as Palestinians living in Israel and left wing activists protest against the Israeli attack on Gaza in down town Haifa, July 18, 2014. Israeli police arrested 28 activists, as protesters took the streets and blocked roads calling to put an end to the attack. (Fiaz abu-Ramele/Activestills.org)

Israeli Palestinians are now being subject to an increasing wave of repression, killings and firing on demonstrators.  Avigdor Lieberman calls for Palestinian Arab Knesset member, Haneen Zoabi to be gaoled (she has already been suspended for an unprecedented 3 months) and for the deportation of the Arabs of the Triangle.

The Jewish State is now showing what that actually means.  Israeli Arabs are now not even a tolerated minority, the Foreign Minister and Prime Minister are calling for their removal to the West Bank.   Below is a report from: 

 Patrick O. Strickland Electronic Intifada Haifa 19 November 2014

Amid Jerusalem violence, Arab workers pay with their livelihoods

Twenty-seven East Jerusalem bus drivers quit their jobs, other go on strike, after fellow driver found hanged in bus; 'people are frightened.'

Israeli Minister of Housing Uri Ariel expressed support for sacking Arab workers from their jobs and for the mayor of Ashkelon's decision to prevent Arabs from working in the city

Nir Hasson Nov. 21, 2014 5:00 

Taxi driver Riyad Jatt of the Silwan neighborhood says he stopped to pick up two female passengers near the entrance to Jerusalem Thursday morning.

“They asked me, are you Jewish or Arab? When I told them I was an Arab they didn’t get in,” he says, adding that after 20 similar incidents he stopped counting. “One man stopped me outside the municipality, looked at me and said no and got out. In [ultra-Orthodox neighborhood] Mea She’arim two women wanted to get in, saw I was an Arab and walked away.”

Palestinian taxi drivers make up at least half the city’s taxi drivers; in a sense, they’re on the very frontline of the confrontation tearing the city apart. It’s hard to find a driver who says he hasn’t been cursed at or beaten up.

Since the attack on a synagogue Tuesday, cruising for passengers in West Jerusalem has become a humiliating and even dangerous experience. Many drivers say they’ve stopped working or have given up working at night.

“People say they don’t want to be the next victim,” says Jatt. As a colleague of his puts it: “I haven’t worked for three days, there’s no work. Nobody comes into the taxi.”

Twenty-seven East Jerusalem bus drivers quit

Twenty-seven East Jerusalem bus drivers quit their jobs on Thursday and dozens of Palestinian drivers employed by bus company Egged have gone on strike for fear of being attacked. The walkout began after driver Yusuf Hassan al-Ramouni was found hanged in his bus in the capital this week.

The bus drivers say Ramouni was murdered by Jewish extremists, despite the coroner’s report that he had committed suicide.

“People are frightened,” says Ala Jalgal, a driver who quit. “They have children; some of their wives tore up their clothes so they couldn’t go to work.”

Egged spokesman Ron Ratner commented on the drivers’ walkout. “In the last few days a handful of drivers from the eastern part of the city have chosen to stop working at Egged for personal reasons,” he said.

“It’s a big privilege to be an Egged driver, and we don’t stand in the way of anyone who gives it up. The drivers’ feelings following the suicide are understandable, but even in these tense days they’re in no danger if they go back to work.”

As tensions have increased in Jerusalem in recent months — and climbed in recent days — Arab taxi drivers say they have been the victims of verbal and physical attacks. Employees in various types of businesses are being fired and others are afraid to go to work. Social media are spreading the hatred — among Jews, there are demands that Arabs be fired and businesses that employ them be boycotted.

On Thursday, right-wing activists and organizations launched a campaign to have Arab workers fired in Jerusalem. Some organizations disseminated lists of businesses that don’t employ Arabs.

On social networks, businesses have announced that they have fired their Arab staff and seek to employ Jews only. Many posts are calling for a boycott of businesses that don’t do the same.

Supermarket-chain owner Rami Levy has come under similar pressure; posts on social networks are calling for boycotts of his stores. But Levy said no worker of his would be fired for being an Arab; he accused his competitors of conspiring against him.

'What if the janitor is a terrorist?'

Meanwhile, parents in the religious state school Harel in the Ramot neighborhood demanded that a Palestinian janitor be replaced.

“It’s not because he’s an Arab, but he’s a young man — we don’t know what he’s done or where he comes from. I’m not judging; he could be a good person, but he could also be a terrorist,” says Gilad Cohen, head of the school’s parents’ committee.

“We’re demanding that he be replaced by a woman so that if something happens, heaven forbid, the school staff — all female teachers but two — can at least react. I get text messages and calls all day from worried parents. One mother wrote: ‘What if he decides to slaughter an entire class? Ten kids will die by the time the security guard shows up.’ On the other hand, some parents are urging us to stop the ranting and raving.”

According to Paz Cohen, the head of the city’s parents’ committee, “I can understand the fear, but you don’t fire a person because of his nationality. Still, today more and more people from the mainstream are saying it’s legitimate.”

For his part, Mayor Nir Barkat has spoken out against firing workers because of their origin.