Family Separation Law: Israel’s Demographic War on Palestine Intensifies

 July 14, 2021

Palestinians waiting at Qalandia Checkpoint (Photo: Patrick Edgar, Supplied)

By Ramzy Baroud

When the Israeli Knesset (parliament) failed to renew what is commonly referred to as the Family Reunification Law, news reports and analyses misrepresented the story altogether. The even split of 59 MKs voting in favor of the law and 59 against it gave the erroneous impression that Israeli lawmakers are equally divided over the right of Palestinians to obtain permanent residency status or citizenship in Israel through marriage. Nothing could be further away from the truth. 

Originally passed in 2003, the Citizenship and Entry Law was effectively a ban on Palestinian marriage. Under the guise of ‘security’, the law prohibited Palestinians in the West Bank, who marry Israeli citizens, to permanently move to Israel, obtain work, permanent residency and, ultimately, citizenship. 

The law was never made permanent as it was subjected to an annual vote, which successfully renewed it 17 times, consecutively. The 18th vote, on July 6, however, ran into an obstacle. Contrary to the perception given by media coverage, those who voted against the renewal of the ban did so for purely political reasons and not out of concern for the tens of thousands of Palestinian families that have splintered and broken up since the law came into effect.

Since the ousting of former Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, at the hands of his protégé, current Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, Israel’s former leader has been determined to topple Bennett’s already fragile coalition. Bennett’s government allies cobble up extreme right-wing parties, including Yamina, the party of the prime minister himself, centrist and even leftist parties, the likes of Meretz. It even hosts an Arab party, United Arab List, or Ra’am, of Mansour Abbas. A coalition of this nature is unlikely to survive long, considering Israel’s tumultuous politics, and Netanyahu – eager for an early election – will do everything in his power to facilitate what he sees as an imminent collapse.

Netanyahu’s Likud party and its allies in the opposition voted against renewing the discriminatory law to score a political point. Their justification, however, was more appalling than the law itself. The Likud wants the temporary law to become a permanent fixture, a Basic Law, to be added to dozens of other similar racially motivated laws that target the very fabric of Palestinian society. 

Welcome to Israel’s demographic war on the Palestinian people. This one-sided war is situated in the belief among Israel’s Jewish majority, that Israel’s greatest challenge is sustaining its demographic advantage which, thanks to a decided campaign of ethnic cleansing that began over seven decades ago, has been held by Jews over Palestinian Arabs. 

Israel’s main fear is not simply a decisive Palestinian majority between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. Israel’s Jewish ruling classes are also rattled by the real possibility of the growing political influence of Israel’s Palestinian Arab constituency, and are doing everything in their power to ensure Palestinian holders of Israeli citizenship are kept at a minimum. The Citizenship and Entry Law was designed specifically to keep this population in check. 

The general elections of March 2020, in particular, provided a taste of what a doomsday scenario would look like.  Arab Israeli parties unified under the single ticket of the Joint List and emerged with 15 seats, making it the third-largest political bloc in the Israeli Knesset, after Likud and Blue and White. If Palestinian Arabs mastered this much influence, though they represent only 20% of the overall Israeli population, imagine what they could do if the demographic tide continues to shift in their favor.

For Israel, the future of Jewish majority – read: supremacy – is dependent on keeping the population equation in favor of Israeli Jews at the expense of Palestinian Arabs. Most of the laws that discriminate against Palestinians, regardless of where they reside – in fact, anywhere in the world – is motivated by this maxim.  

According to the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel (Adalah), Israel’s Palestinian Arab population is targeted with 65 different government laws and regulations, which ensure Palestinian Arabs do not prosper as a community, remaining politically disempowered, socio-economically disadvantaged and constantly threatened with the loss of their residency, and even citizenship. 

Palestinians elsewhere suffer an even worse fate. For example, Palestinians living in Jerusalem, who supposedly hold permanent residency status, are subjected to different types of legal harassment, so that Jerusalem can maintain its current Jewish majority. When Israel illegally occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, the city was almost entirely Palestinian Arab. Through numerous tactics, the city’s Arab population is now an ever-shrinking minority. Worse still, in 2018 Israel passed a law that granted the Ministry of Interior the right to revoke the residency of Jerusalemites based on the murky accusation of ‘breach of loyalty’.  

The occupied West Bank and Gaza are confined, as only Israel determines who remains and who is permanently exiled. The Israeli military occupation of these regions has taken population control to a whole new level; it is almost an exact science.

This is also precisely why Israelis abhor the very discussion of the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees, for they consider it an implicit call for the ‘destruction of Israel as a Jewish state’. According to this logic, if millions of Palestinian refugees are allowed to return to their homes and lands in historic Palestine, Israel will no longer exist in its current form, as a Jewish state, but will become a democratic state for all of its citizens, instead.

What is likely to happen next is that Israel’s Interior Ministry will continue to find caveats in Israel’s ever-flexible laws to block the reunification of Palestinian families, until the Knesset officially renews the Citizenship and Entry Law or, worse, make it permanent. Either way, Israel’s demographic war on Palestinians is likely to intensify in the future. Considering that it is a war that cannot rationally be won, Israel is likely to delve deeper into the abyss of apartheid.

As Israel continues to experiment with controlling the Palestinian population, it would be shameful if the international community continued to remain silent. This moral outrage must end. 

 – Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) and also at the Afro-Middle East Center (AMEC). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

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Escalating the Demographic War: The Strategic Goal of Israeli Racism in Palestine

 November 4, 2020

Racist graffiti on the walls of a Palestinian property in the West Bank. (Photo: via Social Media)

By Ramzy Baroud

The discussion on institutional Israeli racism against its own Palestinian Arab population has all but ceased following the final approval of the discriminatory Nation-State Law in July 2018. Indeed, the latest addition to Israel’s Basic Law is a mere start of a new government-espoused agenda that is designed to further marginalize over a fifth of Israel’s population.

On Wednesday, October 28, eighteen members of the Israeli Parliament (Knesset) conjured up yet another ploy to target Israeli Arab citizens. They proposed a bill that would revoke Israeli citizenship for any Palestinian Arab prisoner in Israel who, directly or indirectly, receives any financial aid from the Palestinian Authority (PA).

Worthy of mention is that these MKs not only represent right-wing, ultra-right and religious parties, but also the Blue and White (Kahol Lavan) ‘centrist’ party. Namely, the proposed bill already has the support of Israel’s parliamentary majority.

But is this really about financial aid for prisoners? Particularly since the PA is nearly bankrupt, and its financial contributions to the families of Palestinian prisoners, even within the Occupied Territories – West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza – is symbolic?

Here is an alternative context. On Thursday, October 29, the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, revealed that the Israeli government of right-wing Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, plans to expand the jurisdiction of the Jewish town of Harish in northern Israel by 50 percent. The aim is to prevent Palestinians from becoming the majority in that area.

The contingency plan was formulated by Israel’s Housing Ministry as a swift response to an internal document, which projects that, by the year 2050, Palestinian Arabs will constitute 51 percent of that region’s population of 700,000 residents.

These are just two examples of recent actions taken within two days, damning evidence that, indeed, the Nation-State law was the mere preface of a long period of institutional racism, which ultimately aims at winning a one-sided demographic war that was launched by Israel against the Palestinian people many years ago.

Since outright ethnic cleansing – which Israel practiced during and after the wars of 1948 and 1967 – is not an option, at least not for now, Israel is finding other ways to ensure a Jewish majority in Israel itself, in Jerusalem, in Area C within the occupied West Bank and, by extension, everywhere else in Palestine.

Israeli dissident historian, Professor Ilan Pappe, refers to this as ‘incremental genocide’. This slow-paced ethnic cleansing includes the expansion of the illegal Jewish settlements in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and the proposed annexation of nearly a third of the Occupied Territories.

The besieged Gaza Strip is a different story. Winning a demographic war in a densely populated but small region of two million inhabitants living within 365 sq. km, was never feasible. The so-called ‘redeployment’ out of Gaza by late Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, in 2005 was a strategic decision, which aimed at cutting Israel’s losses in Gaza in favor of expediting the colonization process in the West Bank and the Naqab Desert. Indeed, most of Gaza’s illegal Jewish settlers were eventually relocated to these demographically-contested regions.

But how is Israel to deal with its own Palestinian Arab population, which now constitutes a sizeable demographic minority and an influential, often united, political bloc?

In the Israeli general elections of March 2020, united Arab Palestinian political parties contesting under the umbrella group, The Joint List, achieved their greatest electoral success yet, as they emerged as Israel’s third-largest political party. This success rang alarm bells among Israel’s Jewish ruling elites, leading to the formation of Israel’s current ‘unity government’. Israel’s two major political parties, Likud and Kahol Lavan, made it clear that no Arab parties would be included in any government coalition.

A strong Arab political constituency represents a nightmare scenario for Israel’s government planners, who are obsessed with demographics and the marginalization of Palestinian Arabs in every possible arena. Hence, the very representatives of the Palestinian Arab community in Israel become a target for political repression.

In a report published in September 2019, the rights group, Amnesty International, revealed that “Palestinian members of the Knesset in Israel are increasingly facing discriminatory attacks.”

“Despite being democratically elected like their Jewish Israeli counterparts, Palestinian MKs are the target of deep-rooted discrimination and undue restrictions that hamstring their ability to speak out in defense of the rights of the Palestinian people,” Amnesty stated.

These revelations were communicated by Amnesty just prior to the September 27 elections. The targeting of Palestinian citizens of Israel is reminiscent of similar harassment and targeting of Palestinian officials and parties in the Occupied Territories, especially prior to local or general elections. Namely, Israel views its own Palestinian Arab population through the same prism that it views its militarily occupied Palestinians.

Since its establishment on the ruins of historic Palestine, and until 1979, Israel governed its Palestinian population through the Defense (Emergency) Regulations. The arbitrary legal system imposed numerous restrictions on those Palestinians who were allowed to remain in Israel following the 1948 Nakba, or ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

In practice, however, the emergency rule was lifted in name only. It was merely redefined, and replaced – according to the Israel-based Adalah rights group – by over 65 laws that directly target the Palestinian Arab minority of Israel. The Nation-State Law, which denies Israel’s Arab minority their legal status, therefore, protection under international law, further accentuates Israel’s relentless war on its Arab minority.

Moreover, “the definition of Israel as ‘the Jewish State’ or ‘the State of the Jewish People’ makes inequality a practical, political and ideological reality for Palestinian citizens of Israel,” according to Adalah.

Israeli racism is not random and cannot be simply classified as yet another human rights violation. It is the core of a sophisticated plan that aims at the political marginalization and economic strangulation of Israel’s Palestinian Arab minority within a constitutional, thus ‘legal’, framework.

Without fully appreciating the end goal of this Israeli strategy, Palestinians and their allies will not have the chance to properly combat it, as they certainly should.

– Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) and also at the Afro-Middle East Center (AMEC). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

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'To win, the Palestinians have to survive’

June 16, 2019  /  Gilad Atzmon

Gilad Atzmon: ‘To win, the Palestinians have to survive’


By Teresa Aranguren,

http://www.resumenlatinoamericano.org

Gilad Atzmon speaks in a torrent of words during our conversation on a sunny terrace in Madrid. He expresses himself passionately, neatly, but never runs over; he seeks to hit the nail and throws phrases like darts that aim to cross, penetrate and reach the other side, rather than hitting a target. I think he asks to be understood, and he makes an effort for it. It is likely because he feels or knows he is ‘misunderstood’.

Gilad Atzmon was born in Israel into a secular but actively Zionist family. He left the country in the early nineties, when he was thirty years old. He says it was the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 that opened his eyes to what Israel is, although it took him a while to leave the country where he was born and raised.

“It was not an easy decision. I left because I understood that I was dwelling in a land that belonged to others. Israel is Palestine. I have never returned, nor will I come back. “

 To say that he is a controversial author is to fall short. Gilad Atzmon is provocative, very politically incorrect and has the gift of bothering right and left, that is, from the right and from the left. He defines himself as a philosopher of politics.

 In his last book Being in Time, a Post-political Manifesto, published by Ediciones de Oriente and the Mediterranean and recently presented in Madrid, he attacks identity politics and what he describes as the tyranny of correctness, both phenomena that according to him are linked and feed each other “in the progressive circles that are so politically correct. People are encouraged to identify as a woman, as a gay, as a black, as a Jew or vegan, but not as a Muslim or White. This policy of exalting particular identities is very problematic and a serious danger, especially for the left, if you can still talk about the left … “

 The question of identity has been the central theme of Atzmon’s work and perhaps his vital and intellectual adventures as well. After all, he is a Jew who grew up in a Zionist family … and is accused by some of anti-Semitism.

“In the past, anti-Semites were people who hated Jews, nowadays people who oppose Israel are labelled anti-Semitic. I’m in the same club as Bernie Sanders, George Galloway, Richard Falk or Roger Waters: the humanists of our time. They call us anti-Semites because we are against what Israel does and what has happened in Iraq and Syria, and the power of the Neocons and AIPAC in Washington … I have never criticized Jews for being Jewish, I am Jewish (GA: this is a mistranslation, I do not identify as Jewish), my wife is Jewish and … – he explodes in a laugh-, my mistress too. I want to be able to criticize Jewishness, the ideology that drives Jewish tribalism, the idea of a chosen people, as any intellectual criticizes Catholicism or as Weber criticized Protestantism, even though I know I’d pay a price for it. The essence of Jewish power is the power to silence all criticism of Jewish power. To say what I want to say, I had to renounce working in the academic world, although I fulfil all the requirements and have all the qualifications. I chose to live as a jazz musician, which is more difficult from an economic standpoint, but it allows me to speak freely.”

Many of his opinions irritate me, for example his contemptuous and ironic look towards the international brigades:

“most were revolutionary Jews who travelled to Spain because they wanted to give their lives in the name of the ‘international working class, but the real workers did not go to Spain, they stayed at home. Real working class people go to work in the morning the feel the urge to identify ‘as working class’).”

Nevertheless, understanding truth as what one believes is true, I recognize an authentic passion for the truth in what he writes and inquires.

Someone said (I think it was Kant) that more important than having the right answers is asking the right questions. In the writings of Gilad Atzmon it is not easy to find answers, but we always find new questions that worry, surprise, challenge the political consensus.

Gilad Atzmon does not accept taboos or the notion of sacred territory, where it is better not to enter. He refuses to let what the rest of us regard as unthinkable stay untouched. Sometimes, his opinions turn out to be impertinent, but their impertinence has to do with their boldness, undoubtedly a form of value.

Before saying goodbye, I ask him if he sees any way out of the drama of Palestine. He remains silent for a moment, searching for the precise words.

“I am not an activist, I do not like to tell people what they should or should not do. But I think the key is a matter of percentages and demographics. It is all about facts on the ground, when the Palestinian population reaches 70% of the total population in Israel, everything will start to change. To win, the Palestinians have to survive.”

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Trump is pulling the strings of the American civil war ترامب يلعب بخيوط الحرب الأهلية الأميركية

Trump is pulling the strings of the American civil war

مايو 9, 2019

Written by Nasser Kandil,

The racist tendencies of the US President Donald Trump as a white settler against the native American Indians might converge with the considerations of the ruling US intelligence and diplomacy in the need to arrange the American inner home after the failure of wars outside it and in order to launch a confrontation that it is easy to ignite but difficult to control and to get out of it. The Venezuelan crisis which was ignited by Washington and its white Canadian ally and some of those who are possessed with the American example as the Indian Liberians in Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Argentina, and Brazil took place during a historic inconsistency between the white racist comer settlers and the Indigenous people whom their cities and towns were exterminated  and hundreds thousands of them were killed while others were obliged to displace to neighboring countries, knowing that the big majority in the south is from the Latin American indigenous people whom were ruled by the Spanish and the Portuguese, while the Evangelical community coming from Scotland and Ireland dominated on the northern regions known today as America.

Certainly, the military confrontation will be an outcome of constitutional legitimacy versus another constitutional legitimacy, and certainly the military balance in Venezuela in any clash will be in favor of the legitimacy of the President Nicolas Maduro, and certainly the achievement of the military balance will require an external intervention that starts in Colombia where America will soon find itself in the heart of the battle, and then the real tyrant aspect of war will begin to emerge. Therefore, once again the war will take place between white and red after three hundred years. It is a war waged by Trump against the Red Indian minority inside America driven by a white racist panic from a demographic imbalance that is similar to the panic of the Zionists in Palestine in 1948 from the demographic imbalance which is in favor of the Arab dark skinned indigenous people. This war will lead to the emergence of a racist ISIS among the white and against the red, it will fight in the northern of America and in the South Africa, and the emergence of a resistance that belongs to the red where the leaders of the Liberian groups in the red continent will become mere white agents who have neglected their belonging and have lived in five-stars hotels as the leaders of the Syrian opposition.

The forthcoming civil war will determine the fate of the unity of the United States of America. The states in which the red skinned people locate are increasing due to the demographic shifts which made one-third of the people of America from Latin roots and which will make them half of the population by 2050. The Mexico wall for which Trump is fighting to build is like the racist separation wall which the Zionists build around their settlements. This symbolic similarity reflects the real connection between the conflict in Latin America and the conflict in our region under one title; the confrontation of the indigenous people of the racist coming settlers. The active communities of both the Levantine Arab immigrants and the Jewish are gathered in Latin America and its countries, and despite the presence of enlightened Jewish elites that are far from the Zionist project and the presence of Arab immigrant elites that follow the US project that represents the scum of liberalism, the importance of both blocs puts them into permanent confrontation entitled the position towards Palestine and the Israeli aggression. Because Venezuela forms the Latin position that supports Palestine, therefore, its fall has become a current Israeli demand to compensate the failure of overthrowing Syria. So supporting Venezuela and its victory has become a necessary complement to Syria’s victory.

The victory of Syria was the factor of the acceleration towards Venezuela which America was foreshadowing of its fall if the American Empire succeeded in invading the world, but at the same time, Syria is a source of inspiration for the people of Latin America at their forefront Venezuela to withstand, exactly as the late President Hugo Chavez said after the victory of the resistance in the south of Lebanon in July 2006 to the leaders of the Bolivian Movement in Latin America that it is time to work after the south of Lebanon has proved that it is possible for the poor and the naïve to determine their fate by themselves.

It can be said that the war which wanted to change Syria has granted it the opportunity to change the world.

Translated by Lina Shehadeh,

يناير 26, 2019

ترامب يلعب بخيوط الحرب الأهلية الأميركية 

ناصر قنديل

– ربما تكون قد تلاقت الميول العنصرية للرئيس الأميركي دونالد ترامب المدفوعة بخلفية المستوطن الأبيض ضد السكان الأصليين الحمر، مع حسابات المؤسسة الأميركية الحاكمة في المخابرات والدبلوماسية في الحاجة لترتيب البيت الداخلي في القارة الأميركية بعد فشل الحروب خارجها، لإطلاق مواجهة يبدو من السهل تفجيرها، لكن سيكون من الصعب التحكم بمساراتها، خصوصاً رسم كيفية الخروج منها. فالأزمة الفنزويلية التي دخلتها واشنطن ومعها حليفها الكندي الأبيض وبعض المأخوذين بالنموذج الأميركي من المتمولين الليبراليين الحمر في فنزويلا وكولومبيا والبيرو والأرجنتين والبرازيل، تقع على خط تماس تاريخي لجرح لم يندمل بعد بين المستوطنين البيض العنصريين الوافدين، والسكان الأصليين الذين دمّرت مدنهم وبلداتهم وأبيد مئات الآلاف منهم وأجبر مئات الآلاف الآخرين على اللجوء إلى البلدان المجاورة، حيث الغالبية الكاسحة في الجنوب هي من السكان الأصليين ذوي البشرة الحمراء، والذين يسمّون باللاتينيين، وقد تقاسم حكمهم الأسبان والبرتغاليون، بينما هيمنت الجاليات الإنجيلية الوافدة من إسكتلندا وإيرلندا على المناطق الشمالية المعروفة اليوم باسم أميركا.

– الأكيد هو أن المواجهة العسكرية ستكون نتاجاً طبيعياً لوضع شرعية دستورية في مواجهة مع شرعية دستورية أخرى، والأكيد أن التوازن العسكري داخل فنزويلا في أي صدام سيكون لصالح شرعية الرئيس نيكولاس مادورو، والأكيد أن تحقيق التوازن العسكري سيتطلّب تدخلاً خارجياً يبدأ بكولومبيا وسرعان ما تجد أميركا أنها في قلب المعركة. وعندها يبدأ البعد الحقيقي للحرب بالطغيان، حرب البيض والحمر مجدداً بعد ثلاثمئة عام. وهي حرب يخوضها ترامب على البارد ضد الأقلية ذات البشرة الحمراء داخل أميركا نفسها، مدفوعاً بذعر عنصري أبيض من خلل ديمغرافي يشبه ذعر الصهاينة في فلسطين عام 1948 من الخلل الديمغرافي لصالح السكان الأصليين العرب ذوي البشرة السمراء. وستتكفل هذه الحرب بظهور تنظيم داعش عنصري بين البيض ضد الحمر، يقاتل داخل شمال أميركا وفي القارة الجنوبية، وظهور مقاومة للحمر تعمّ القارة، ويصير قادة المجموعات الليبرالية في القارة الحمراء مجرد عملاء للبيض باعوا جلدتهم ويتوزّعون فنادق الخمسة نجوم أسوة بقادة المعارضة السورية.

– الحرب الأهلية المقبلة ستقرّر مصير وحدة الولايات المتحدة الأميركية، حيث الولايات التي يتركّز فيها ذوو البشرة الحمراء تتزايد مع التحوّلات الديمغرافية التي جعلت ثلث سكان أميركا من أصول لاتينية وستجعلهم نصف السكان بحلول العام 2050، وبصورة أو بأخرى يشبه جدار المكسيك الذي يقاتل ترامب لبنائه جدار الفصل العنصري الذي يبنيه الصهاينة حول المستوطنات. وهذا التشابه الرمزي يعكس حقيقة واقعية للصلة بين الصراع في أميركا اللاتينية والصراع في منطقتنا، والعنوان الواحد مواجهة سكان البلاد الأصليين للمستوطنين العنصريين الوافدين، حيث تتجمع في أميركا اللاتينية ودولها الجاليات النشيطة لكل من العرب المشرقيين المهاجرين والرعية اليهودية، وبالرغم من وجود نخب يهودية متنوّرة بعيدة عن المشروع الصهيوني ووجود نخب عربية مهاجرة ملتحقة بالمشروع الأميركي وتمثل حثالة الليبرالية إلا أن الوزن الرئيسي لكل من الكتلتين يضعهما في مواجهة دائمة عنوانها الموقف من فلسطين والعدوان الإسرائيلي، وحيث فنزويلا تشكل رمز الموقف اللاتيني الداعم لفلسطين، ويصير إسقاطها مطلباً إسرائيلياً راهناً تعويضاً عن الفشل بإسقاط سورية، يصير تحصين فنزويلا ونصرها تتمة ضرورية لنصر سورية.

– انتصار سورية كان عامل التسريع في الالتفات الأميركي نحو فنزويلا التي كان التقدير الأميركي بسقوطها التلقائي لو نجحت الغزوة الإمبراطورية الأميركية في العالم، وما عاد تحملها ممكناً بعد الفشل، لكنه بالقدر نفسه سيكون مصدر الإلهام لشعوب أميركا اللاتينية وفي مقدّمتها فنزويلا للصمود، تماماً كما قال الرئيس الراحل هوغو تشافيز بعد انتصار المقاومة في حرب تموز 2006 لقادة الحركة البوليفارية في أميركا اللاتينية أن ساعة العمل قد دقت، بعدما أثبت جنوب لبنان أنه لا يزال بإمكان الفقراء والبسطاء أن يقرروا مصيرهم بأنفسهم.

– هكذا يصح القول إن الحرب التي أرادت تغيير سورية منحت سورية الفرصة لتغير العالم.

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Israel Faces the Demographic Bomb

March 26, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

Reported by Gilad Atzmon

I learned a decade ago from the Palestinian ambassador to Britain that while Israel has many bombs, the Palestinians have one bomb, namely the demographic one.

As it seems, this bomb is about to detonate. Ynet reports today the numbers of Israeli and Palestinians live in between the river and the sea are pretty much identical.

“An equal number of Jews and Muslims live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, according to fresh statistics presented Monday morning to the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.”

Five million Palestinians live in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and in east Jerusalem, the data indicated—later discussed in detail by the Deputy Commander of the Israel Civil Administration (ICA)—which operates Israeli governance in the West Bank—Col. Uri Mandes.

According to 2016 figures from the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), 6.44 million Jews live in Israel alongside 1.52 million Muslims.

In total, the demographic report concludes that 6.5 million Muslims live between the sea and the Jordan River.

The ICA, it should be noted, relies on figures provided by the Palestinian CBS, which is considered to be a relatively reliable source.

The Palestinian CBS said that the number of Palestinians and Arab-Israelis combined, between the river and the sea, stood at 6.1 million and that the number is expected to increase to 7.1 million until 2020.

Israelis don’t like the idea. MK Avi Dichter (Likud), who chaired the committee meeting, expressed his skepticism at the veracity of the figures.

MK Tzipi Livni (Zionist Union) responded to the revelations on her Twitter account, using the figures to attack the notion of annexing the West Bank. “If we don’t wake up from the delusions of annexation, we will lose the Jewish majority. It’s that simple,” she wrote.

Reading comprehension is not one of Livni’s fortes. Jewish majority in Palestine belongs to the past!

Being in Time – A Post Political Manifesto

Amazon.co.uk  ,  Amazon.com  and   here  (gilad.co.uk)

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!

Immigration to Israeli-occupied territories hit a 10-year high in 2014

Palestinians holding the Palestinian flag during a protest against the Israeli apartheid wall and illegal Zionist settlements at Bilin Village, in Ramallah, West Bank on December 26, 2014. Anadolu/Issam Rimawi

Published Friday, January 2, 2015
The number of immigrants moving to Israeli-occupied territories leapt in 2014 to its highest figure in a decade, with western Europe leading the way, the Israeli immigration ministry said Wednesday.

Immigration hit a 10-year high, with the arrival of some 26,500 new settlers, according to a joint statement with the Jewish Agency, a quasi-governmental organization tasked with encouraging Jews to move to Israel.

This marks a significant 32 percent increase over last year's approximately 20,000 immigrants, the statement said.

This "was a year of record-breaking aliyah," Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky said, using the Hebrew word for immigration to Occupied Palestine.

For the first time ever, France provided the biggest number, as more than 6,600 people moved to the Israeli-occupied territories. That was nearly twice the 3,400 who arrived in 2013.

Overall, immigration from Western Europe increased 88 percent, with the arrival of some 8,640 people, compared with 4,600 a year earlier.

Some 620 arrived from Britain, compared with 520 a year earlier, and the number from Italy doubled to 340. Around 240 arrived from Belgium, a slight decrease, and the number from Germany remained stable, at approximately 120.

Immigration from former Soviet Union countries saw a 50 percent increase, with the arrival of some 11,430 settlers, compared with 7,610 in 2013.

That was largely driven by an exodus from conflict-wracked Ukraine, where the number surged 190 percent to 5,840.

More than half of all people moving in 2014 were under 35, among them 5,300 children and some 8,200 adults aged between 18-34.

The roots of the Israel-Palestine conflict date back to 1917, when the British government, in the now-infamous Balfour Declaration, called for "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people."

Jewish immigration rose considerably under the British administration of Palestine, which was consolidated by a League of Nations "mandate" in 1922.

In 1948, with the end of the mandate, a new state – Israel – was declared inside historical Palestine.

More than three million Jews have immigrated to Israeli-occupied territories since the occupation of Palestine in 1948 -- including one million from former Soviet states since 1990 -- under the Law of Return, which offers citizenship and benefits to Jews from anywhere in the world.

As a result, some 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes or were forcibly expelled during the 1948 occupation, while hundreds of Palestinian villages and cities were razed to the ground by invading Zionist forces.

The Palestinian diaspora has since become one of the largest in the world. Palestinian refugees are currently spread across the region and in other countries, while many have settled in refugee camps in the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israel then occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank during the 1967 Middle East War. It later annexed the holy city in 1980, claiming it as the capital of the self-proclaimed Zionist state – a move never recognized by the international community.

More than 600,000 Israeli settlers, soaring from 189,000 in 1989, live in settlements across the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem, in contravention of international law.

Meanwhile, Israel has systematically tried to obliterate, annex and confiscate Palestinian land and possessions as it seeks to strip the land it occupies of its Palestinian identity.

Palestinians accuse Israel of heritage theft as Israeli authorities, besides taking over Palestinian lands and properties, deliberately target sites that have historical importance and provide evidence of Palestinian heritage and culture.

Following its expulsion of Palestinians in 1948, Israel rewrote maps, changed the names of Palestinian towns and streets, and tailored their own versions of history very early on in an attempt to oppress the Palestinian narrative.

(AFP, Al-Akhbar)

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ZIONISTS ‘BOUT TO TRIP: PALESTINIANS TO OUTNUMBER JEWS IN HISTORIC PALESTINE BY 2016

DECEMBER 30, 2014

RAMALLAH (Ma’an) — Figures released by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics on Monday suggest that Palestinians will outnumber Israeli Jews in historic Palestine within the next two years.

The results of the Palestinian census, released on the occasion of the end of 2014, show a number of other surprising figures that highlight the wide-ranging changes in demography the Holy Land is experiencing.

The census estimated that at the end of 2014 the total number of Palestinians in “historical Palestine” — meaning the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the territory where the State of Israel is located but which often referred to as ’48 Palestine — is around 6.08 million, compared to 6.10 million Jews as of the beginning of 2014.

By the end of 2016, the census bureau estimates that at current rates the number of Palestinians will eclipse that of Jews, meeting at around 6.42 million.

By 2020, however, the statistics show that the number of Palestinians will hit 7.14 million, while the Jewish population will have only reached around 6.87 million.

The demographic shift was expected to happen years ago, but the migration of more than a million people to Israel from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s — a large percentage of whom were not Jews, but were naturalized anyways due to the fact that they had Jewish relatives — delayed the change.

The census bureau surveyed not only historic Palestine, but also included Palestinians around the world in its results.

The bureau estimates that the total number of Palestinians worldwide as of the end of 2014 is 12.10 million, “of whom 4.62 million are in State of Palestine, 1.46 million in Israel, 5.34 million in Arab countries, and around 675 thousand in foreign countries.”

The statistics show the continuing impact of the Nakba — or the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from what is now Israel into refugee camps elsewhere — on the distribution of the Palestinian population, as well as the recurrent displacements and widespread flight since then as the result of the 1967 occupation and the effects of the occupation.

Of the 4.6 million living in the State of Palestine, the bureau estimated that around 2.83 million reside in the West Bank and 1.79 million in Gaza Strip.

“Palestinian refugees make up 43.1 percent of the Palestinian population in Palestine: 38.8 percent of them in the West Bank and 61.2 percent in Gaza Strip,” the reported added, underscoring that even within the State of Palestine itself, refugees and their descendants from the 1948 expulsions make up a sizable number.

The report also compared birth rates among the Palestinian populations spread around the world, highlighting the drastic declines in fertility rates that characterized trends in the State of Palestine.

“The average household size in Palestine was 5.2 persons in 2013 compared to 6.4 in 1997: 4.9 persons in the West Bank and 5.8 persons in Gaza Strip,” the report said.

“The total fertility rate declined during 2011-2013 to 4.1 births compared with 6.0 births in 1997. In Gaza Strip the rate was 4.5 births compared to 3.7 births in the West Bank during 2011-2013,” it added.

The rates are significantly higher than Palestinian refugees living abroad, where rates are comparatively lower.

“The total fertility rate for Palestinian woman living in Jordan was 3.3 births in 2010 compared to 2.5 in Syria in 2010 and 2.8 in Lebanon in 2011,” the report said.

Palestinian citizens of Israel also had birthrates comparatively lower than the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with averages around 3.4 births per woman. However, the number was higher than Israeli Jews, who have an average of around 3.1 births.

“The number of Palestinians living in Israel is 1.46 million, of whom about 35.4% are aged below 15 years compared to 4.3% aged 65 years and over,” the report noted.

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Religious intolerance in Israel

The terror lurking in a Christmas tree

By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth

Israel tries to ban non-Jewish celebrations

Israel’s large Palestinian minority is often spoken of in terms of the threat it poses to the Jewish majority. Palestinian citizens’ reproductive rate constitutes a “demographic time bomb”, while their main political programme – Israel’s reform into “a state of all its citizens” – is proof for most Israeli Jews that their compatriots are really a “fifth column”.

But who would imagine that Israeli Jews could be so intimidated by the innocuous Christmas tree?
This issue first came to public attention two years ago when it was revealed that Shimon Gapso, the mayor of Upper Nazareth, had banned Christmas trees from all public buildings in his northern Israeli city.

Upper Nazareth is a Jewish town and all its symbols are Jewish. As long as I hold office, no non-Jewish symbol will be presented in the city. (Shimon Gapso, Jewish Mayor of Upper Galilee)

“Upper Nazareth is a Jewish town and all its symbols are Jewish,” Gapso said. “As long as I hold office, no non-Jewish symbol will be presented in the city.”

The decision reflected in part his concern that Upper Nazareth, built in the 1950s as the centrepiece of the Israeli government’s “Judaization of the Galilee” programme, was failing dismally in its mission.

Far from “swallowing up” the historic Palestinian city of Nazareth next door, as officials had intended, Upper Nazareth became over time a magnet for wealthier Nazarenes who could no longer find a place to build a home in their own city. That was because almost all Nazareth’s available green space had been confiscated for the benefit of Upper Nazareth.

Instead Nazarenes, many of them Palestinian Christians, have been buying homes in Upper Nazareth from Jews – often immigrants from the former Soviet Union – desperate to leave the Arab-dominated Galilee and head to the country’s centre, to be nearer Tel Aviv.

The exodus of Jews and influx of Palestinians have led the government to secretly designate Upper Nazareth as a “mixed city”, much to the embarrassment of Gapso. The mayor is a stalwart ally of far-right politician Avigdor Lieberman and regularly expresses virulently anti-Arab views, including recently calling Nazarenes “Israel-hating residents whose place is in Gaza” and their city “a nest of terror in the heart of the Galilee”.

Although neither Gapso nor the government has published census figures to clarify the city’s current demographic balance, most estimates suggest that at least a fifth of Upper Nazareth’s residents are Palestinian. The city’s council chamber also now includes Palestinian representatives.

Christmas trees “offensive to Jewish eyes”

But Gapso is not alone in his trenchant opposition to making even the most cursory nod towards multiculturalism. The city’s chief rabbi, Isaiah Herzl, has refused to countenance a single Christmas tree in Upper Nazareth, arguing that it would be “offensive to Jewish eyes”.

That view, it seems, reflects the official position of the country’s rabbinate. In so far as they are able, the rabbis have sought to ban Christmas celebrations in public buildings, including in the hundreds of hotels across the country.

A recent report in the Haaretz newspaper, on an Israeli Jew who grows Christmas trees commercially, noted in passing: “Hotels – under threat of losing kashrut certificates – are prohibited by the rabbinate from decking their halls in boughs of holly or, heaven forbid, putting up even the smallest of small sparkly Christmas tree in the corner of the lobby.”

In other words, the rabbinate has been quietly terrorizing Israeli hotel owners into ignoring Christmas by threatening to use its powers to put them out of business. Denying a hotel its kashrut (kosher) certificate would lose it most of its Israeli and foreign Jewish clientele.

Few mayors or rabbis find themselves in the uncomfortable position of needing to go public with their views on the dangers of Christmas decorations. In Israel, segregation between Jews and Palestinians is almost complete. Even most of the handful of mixed cities are really Jewish cities with slum-like ghettoes of Palestinians living on the periphery.

Apart from Upper Nazareth, the only other “mixed” place where Palestinian Christians are to be found in significant numbers is Haifa, Israel’s third largest city. Haifa is often referred to as Israel’s most multicultural and tolerant city, a title for which it faces very little competition.

Non-Jewish New Year celebrations “seriously forbidden”

“It is a seriously forbidden to hold any event at the end of the calendar year that is connected with or displays anything from the non-Jewish festivals.” (Letter from Haifa rabbinate)

But the image hides a dirtier reality. A recent letter from Haifa’s rabbinate came to light in which the city’s hotels and events halls were reminded that they must not host New Year’s parties at the end of this month (the Jewish New Year happens at a different time of year). The hotels and halls were warned that they would be denied their kashrut licences if they did so.

“It is a seriously forbidden to hold any event at the end of the calendar year that is connected with or displays anything from the non-Jewish festivals,” the letter states.

After the letter was publicized on Facebook, Haifa’s mayor, Yona Yahav, moved into damage limitation mode, overruling the city’s rabbinical council on 23 December and insisting that parties would be allowed to go ahead. Whether Yahav has the power to enforce his decision on the notoriously independent-minded rabbinical authorities is still uncertain.

But what is clear is that there is plenty of religious intolerance verging on hatred being quietly exercised against non-Jews, mostly behind the scenes so as not to disturb Israel’s “Jewish and democratic” image or outrage the millions of Christian tourists and pilgrims who visit Israel each year.  

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian  
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!