Mr. Netanyahu and the Elimination of the Landscape
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 5 Feb 2018
Walid Salem – TRANSCEND Media Service
3 Feb 2018 – During his 30th of January participation in the opening ceremony of a new bypass road that links Binyamin block settlements in the West Bank with the city of Kfar Saba inside Israel, Mr Netanyahu the Prime Minister of Israel spoke about the “Jewish return to their homeland” by building and creating roads and routes of transportation here in the heart of Israel as he said. Besides this kind of well known repeated statements about the ongoing process of creating the” Greater Israel” on the expense of the Palestinians, Mr Netanyahu presented a new theme concerning his government aim “ To cancel and simply dissolve the concept of the periphery”. The meaning of that of course is “dissolving the Palestinian country life”.
In its path towards an Israeli one state solution, today Netanyahu government feels that it succeeded in taking over Area C consisting of two third of the West Bank in addition to East Jerusalem( continuously expanding in the expense of West Bank) and Hebron 2( The Old City of Hebron that is under Israeli full control), and the Jordan valley. That all besides moving the Palestinian Refugees issues out of the table, while also it got earlier a free hand in regard to its policies towards the Palestinians indigenous population inside Israel.
For that government the next ongoing step is about eliminating the Palestinians villages, by the two means of demographic elimination, and the landscape elimination. Worthy to mention here that these villages already lost their agricultural lands located in area C, or behind the separation wall.
There are different examples regarding the attempts for demographic elimination. One of the last examples is the ongoing voting in the Israeli Knesset for ousting Kufr Aqab, and Shu’afat Refugee Camp from Jerusalem, and the second is about the settlers attacks against the Palestinian villages in order to frighten them and push them to leave. One of the last examples regarding this is the settlers attack against Azzoun village close to Qalqilia leaving 60 people injured last month and the attacks on Hizma village near Jerusalem by the Israeli army including putting gates on its entrance. All this following the continous evacuations of the Palestinian Bedouins from Area C, and preventing the Gazans to build or even to cultivate their lands that are adjacent to the borders with Israel.
These demographic elimination acts add up to the changing and the elimination of the landscape. Besides them the landscape is changed also by the separation wall, cutting the trees, expanding the settlements,preventing people to cultivate their lands in some areas, creating bypass roads, and other means. Now Mr Netanyahu came to tell openly what was the original aim of all of these steps. The aim was not security of the Israelis, but in the contrary: Security was used as a justification to expand the settlements infrastructure in the path of Israelizng the West Bank and to make it follow East Jerusalem in this regard.
Other charicteristic in Mr Netanyahu speech is that he talked about the periphery as a landscape, forgetting to mention the indegenous people who live in that landscape. For him neither these people, nor their rights count. For him they are just an obstacle that a solution might be found to it by either removing them from one location to other( as happening with the Bedouins), or by secondly evacuating them(Formerly Al Aqaba village close to Jenin and the old cities of Jerusalem and Hebron as examples, and currently Sosia village close to Hebron as one example.Finally and thirdly by simply destroying the villages as happened with the three villages of Yalo, Emuas and Beit Noba in 1967.
The other charecteristic of Netanyahu statement is related to the racist concept of considering Palestine as a barren land (from the civilized). Therefore it is the responsibility of the civilized to “ modernize” it by “ dissolving the periphery” and getting rid of the non- civilized through this process.
As such, Israel looks to be already crossed the threshold between compromising the fate of the Palestinian occupied Territories through negotiations, and annexing them to Israel.Today Israel acts on the basis that East Jerusalem and West Bank are integral parts of Israel. In this regard the difference between East Jerusalem and West Bank Israeli politics wise,is in that Jerusalem is annexed officially to Israel, and therefore the Palestinians of East Jerusalem carry an Israeli blue identity cards that give them
the status of “ Jordanians citizens residing permanently in Israel”, while the West Bank people do not have such ID’s. Besides this difference the rest of the policies are the same towards both West Bank and East Jerusalem Palestinians.
Confronting these kinds of moves will require another kind of policies that are bottom up rather than top down, and that is by helping the Palestinians to create their facts in the ground, and standing strongly( in the ground, and not by only statements) against the Israeli steps of Israelization. The calls for the sides to go back to negotiations only while Israel is grabbing Palestine in the ground is certainly a very bad policy. Instead of moving forward it gives “longer time out to Israel” to complete the Israelization process.
Further than that association agreements with Palestine, more recognitions of it, and more elevation of it in the international arena is badly needed as a complimentary to building Palestine in the ground and not as a contrary to the latter.
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Dr. Walid Salem is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment. He was born in East Jerusalem in 1957 and teaches democracy and human rights at AlQuds University. He is a writer of thirty books and training manuals, and tens of research papers on Democracy, civil society, citizenship, refugees, and Jerusalem. He is also a consultant, evaluator, and trainer for several public and private bodies. Salem trained more than thirty thousand Palestinians on these issues since 1990, and, since 1993, he is the Director of The Centre for Democracy and Community Development, East Jerusalem. He is the Coordinator of Middle East Citizen Assembly as regional network of experts and activists on citizenship issues that include participants from 19 countries from the region since 2004. He has lectured at several international conferences and seminars about democracy, Jerusalem, refugees, and development in Palestine.
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This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 5 Feb 2018.
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