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The same malign intent from Israel towards
the Palestinians is stamped through its history like the lettering
in a children's stick of seaside rock. But despite the consistent
aim of Israeli policy, generation after generation of Western
politicians, diplomats and journalists has shown a repeated inability
to grasp what is happening before its very eyes.
The Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi once noted that the
first goal of Israel's founders as they prepared to establish
their Jewish state on a large swath of the Palestinian homeland
in 1948 was to empty Palestine's urban heartlands of their educated
elites.
Even before Israel's Declaration
of Independence on 15 May 1948, most Palestinians had been terrified
away from the two wealthiest cities in coastal Palestine, Jaffa
and Haifa. Other Palestinian cities soon fell during the war
of 1948: Israeli forces mostly cleansed Lydda, Ramle, Acre, Safad,
Tiberias, Baysan and Bir Saba of their native populations. Today
all these cities have been repopulated with Jews -- as well as
renamed.
Khalidi has written: "These
refugees from the urban areas of the country generally tended
to be those Palestinians with the highest levels of literacy,
skills, wealth, and education". Or, in other words, the
small number of Palestinians allowed to remain in their homeland
by Israel were peasant families living in isolated rural communities.
These Palestinians posed little
threat to the new Jewish state: they lacked the education and
tools to resist both the wholesale dispossession of their people
and their own personal loss as their farm lands were expropriated
by the state to establish the Jewish farming communes of the
kibbutz and moshav movements.
And so history repeats itself.
As Israel's violent siege of Gaza continues, the Associated Press
reported this week that dozens of Palestinians with American
passports have left Gaza, escorted out of the Strip in a convoy
of United Nations vehicles. One Palestinian American mother said
she and her children could no longer stand the terrifying sonic
booms produced by Israeli aircraft flying overhead during the
night.
These fleeing Palestinians
have two things that most of their kin in Gaza lack: they have
lots of money that they might have invested in rebuilding Gaza's
economy were Israel not intent on destroying it; and they are
familiar with a language and ideas that might have conveyed very
effectively
to Western audiences the horror currently being endured by Gaza's
civilian population.
They are also among the least
radicalised elements of Gaza's population and might have been
the ones most willing to start a dialogue with Israel -- had
Israel shown any interest in negotiating.
But of course their absence
from Gaza, and flight to America, will not be mourned by Israel.
How much Israel fears the presence
in the occupied territories of Palestinians who have lived in
the West -- those who have money and influence, and speak in
a language the non-Arab world can understand -- was highlighted
in another piece of news this week that went mostly unnoticed.
According to the Haaretz newspaper,
Israel's interior ministry has been quietly implementing a new
rule since April that allows it to refuse entry to Palestinians
holding foreign passports to Israel and the occupied territories.
Most of those affected are Palestinians who today have citizenship
in America or Europe.
Israel has this power over
these Palestinians' lives because, since its occupation of the
West Bank and Gaza in 1967, it has usurped control of the borders
of the Palestinian territories. In another sign of how mistaken
Western observers are in believing that the occupation of Gaza
somehow ended with the withdrawal of Jewish settlers last year,
Israel is still able to prevent Palestinians with a foreign passport
(as well as those from the West Bank) from entering Gaza.
This new policy of exclusion
affects thousands of the wealthiest and most educated Palestinians,
some of whom have been living in the occupied territories for
a decade or more investing in the economy as entrepreneurs, teaching
in the universities or establishing desperately needed civil
society organisations.
In another irony, many of these
Palestinians have a foreign passport only because Israel stripped
them of their rights to residency in the occupied territories
in violation of international law. Using its control of the area's
borders since 1967, Israel revoked the residency of these Palestinians
while they were studying or working abroad.
As the Israeli journalist Amira
Hass documented in a recent dispatch,
some of these Palestinians eventually came back to the occupied
territories after marrying a local Palestinian resident but were
refused rights of residency they should be entitled to according
to the normal principles of family unification.
Instead most Palestinians with
foreign passports have remained in the occupied territories at
Israel's discretion: as long as they renewed their tourist visa
every three months by crossing the border into Jordan or Egypt,
they were left in relative peace.
But Israel is now unilaterally
changing the rules (as it always does), even if it has been too
embarrassed to declare the fact openly. Apparently the US embassy
has been aware of the change for some time but does not think
it should intervene in the "sovereign decisions" of
another country -- or, more accurately, in the decisions of a
sovereign country, Israel, in violating the rights of an occupied
people, the Palestinians.
Palestinians with US passports
have been told by Israel that, when their three-month visas expire,
they will no longer be entitled to enter the occupied territories
to visit their families -- except in rare "humanitarian
cases" such as a close relative dying. Some will be separated
from their spouse and children, while others will lose their
businesses and everything they have invested in them.
With these foreign passport
holders forced to leave the occupied territories, the pressure
is sure to grow on their families left behind in Gaza and the
West Bank to seek ways to emigrate abroad to be with them again.
The purpose of Israel's current
bureaucratic obscenity is the same as it was in 1948 when its
highest priority was the clearing of the Palestinian cities of
their elites to make way for the establishment of the Jewish
state.
This time Israel needs to empty
the ghettoes it is crafting for the Palestinians of the most
educated and well-connected of their number so that it can more
credibly claim that there is no one "moderate" to talk
to. Any Palestinian with a stake in an Israeli-imposed peace,
even one that damages Palestinian national interests, will have
been forced out by Israel's policies long before.
Those who remain behind, trapped
by walls of concrete and steel, will be powerless to resist the
unilateral and illegal expansion of Israel's borders explicit
in Ehud Olmert's convergence plan.
When the only noise heard from
the Palestinians in their cages is the occasional whine of a
home-made Qassam rocket flying out of the ghetto into the Jewish
state, we will be told by Israel and its US ally that terror
is the only language the Palestinians know.
But, in truth, it may well
be the only language we have left the Palestinians to speak.
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