The Palestinians of Israel are poised to take centre stage

[Violet_Crumble]

With the peace process going nowhere, common experience on both sides of the Green Line is creating a new reality


Seumas Milne
guardian.co.uk
Wednesday 10 November 2010 21.00 GMT

In a quiet street in the Sheikh Jarrah district of occupied East Jerusalem 88-year-old Rifka al-Kurd is explaining how she came to live in the house she and her husband built as Palestinian refugees in the 1950s. As she speaks, three young ultra-orthodox Jewish settlers swagger in to stake their claim to the front part of the building, shouting abuse in Hebrew and broken Arabic: "Arab animals", "shut up, whore".

There is a brief physical confrontation with Rifka's daughter as the settlers barricade themselves in to the rooms they have occupied since last winter. That was when they finally won a court order to take over the Kurd family's extension on the grounds that it was built without permission – which Palestinians in Jerusalem are almost never granted. It is an ugly scene, the settlers' chilling arrogance underpinned by the certain knowledge that they can call in the police and army at will.

But such takeovers of Palestinian homes in Sheikh Jarrah have become commonplace, and the focus of continual protest. The same is true in nearby Silwan, home to upwards of 30,000 Palestinians next to the Old City, where 88 homes to 1,500 Palestinians have been lined up for demolition to make way for a King David theme park and hundreds of settlers are protected round the clock by trigger-happy security guards.

Throughout the Arab areas of Jerusalem, as in the West Bank, the government is pressing ahead with land expropriations, demolitions and settlement building, making the prospects of a Palestinian state ever more improbable. More than a third of the land in East Jerusalem has been expropriated since it was occupied in 1967 to make way for Israeli colonists, in flagrant violation of international law.

Israel's latest settlement plans were not "helpful", Barack Obama ventured on Tuesday. But while US-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian negotiations go nowhere and attention has been focused on the brutal siege of Gaza, the colonisation goes on. It is also proceeding apace in Israel proper, where the demolition of Palestinian Bedouin villages around the Negev desert has accelerated under Binyamin Netanyahu.

About 87,000 Bedouin live in 45 "unrecognised" villages, without rights or basic public services, because the Israeli authorities refuse to recognise their claim to the land. All have demolition orders hanging over them, while hundreds of Jewish settlements have been established throughout the area.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/10/palestinians-poised-to-take-centre-stage

[aquart]

1. And?

Arabs should have possession of the entire Middle East? Why? Because their tantrums are more deadly?

And whatever happened to the four paragraph rule?

[Violet_Crumble]

2. And? The article was about Israeli Arabs. I suggest you read before replying in future...

The article was about the experience of Israeli Arabs in Israel. Reading the article would save you coming up with bizarre 'questions' like those...

As far as I'm aware there's no four paragraph rule here. If going to five or six (it must get you soooo upset when some people post far, far more) offends you then I suggest you hit alert and complaining to the mods...

[Ken Burch]

3. Not possession. Just not dispossession.

There's no excuse for any discrimination at all towards the Palestinian minority within Israel. If they'd been treated as full equals from the very start, they'd be completely cooperative within Israeli society and might well be a bridge group that could create dialogue between Israeli Jews and the Palestinians in the Territories.

You wouldn't have minded that happening, I assume?

[parkia00]

4. And What?!

Did you read the article? Reading it in future might save you from making replies to posting that range from the plain bizarre to those that cause other readers to have an uncontrollable reaction to face palm their foreheads.

[LeftishBrit]

5. This is about Arabs who were born in Israel..

Not about anyone else gaining 'possession'.

[oberliner]

6. What is the proper term for them?

Palestinians? Israeli Arabs? Something else?

[LeftishBrit]

7. There are several terms used

'Israeli Arabs'; 'Palestinian citizens of Israel'; and similar.

At any rate, they should obviously not be regarded as immigrants or invaders. Possibly, the post to which I responded misunderstood the OP title as referring to a 'one-state solution'. But it was just about fair treatment for a quite large existing minority within Israel.

[oberliner]

9. But how do most self-identify?

And has that changed recently?

[LeftishBrit]

10. From what I can gather...

(which may not be totally up to date), most regard themselves as Palestinian ethnically and Israeli by citizenship, so call themselves 'Palestinians in Israel', 'Palestinian citizens of Israel', 'Arabs in Israel', etc. Israeli Jews tend to use 'Israeli Arabs', which some Arabs accept as a valid term, and some don't.

[Crunchy Frog]

8. So ethnic cleansing is OK as long as it's being done to Ayrabs?

[azurnoir]

11. Israeli Muslims grow extreme as others secularize

The arrests of two Israeli Muslim clerics in the last five weeks indicates a widening rift in the country’s Arab minority, as growing secularism pushes the religious into adopting more extreme philosophies and practices, analysts said.

<snip>

He noted that opinion polls consistently show that 80% of Israeli Arabs wish to stay part of Israel even of a Palestinian state is established. According to the Herzliya Patriotism Survey carried out in 2006, 56% of Israeli Arabs are not proud of their Israeli citizenship; however 82% said they would rather be citizens of Israel than of any other country in the world.

"The phenomenon of radicalization is global, and Israel is part of the world," Kedar told The Media Line. "It began with the Islamic revolution in Iran and continues today with Al-Qaeda."

Arab Israelis were frustrated by the fact that while radical Muslim clerics were arrested for their opinions, leading rabbis who incited against Arabs were not even questioned by police, Ali said.

"This makes people feel that the Israeli democracy applies only to some of the citizens, and not others" he said.

http://www.jpost.com/NationalNews/Article.aspx?id=196188